2017’s developer conference has been and gone; time to pay my dues in a blog post or two.
Day 0: Welcome dinner, 29 March 2017
The Cambridge InterMine arrived at Walnut Creek without a hitch, and after a jetlagged attempt at a night’s sleep we sat down to a mega-grant-writing session in the hotel lobby, fuelled by several pots of coffee and plates of nachos.
By 7PM, people had begun to gather in the lobby to head to the inaugural conference dinner at the delicious Walnut Creek Yacht Club. We had to change the venue quite late on in the game, meaning we decided to wander down the street to collect some of the InterMiners who had ended up at the original venue (sorry!!). By the end of the meal, most of the UK contingent was dead on their feet – 10pm California time worked out to be 6am according to our body clocks, so when Joe offered to give several of us a lift back to the hotel, it was impossible to decline.
Day 1: Workshop Intro
The day started with intros from our PI, Gos, and our host, David Goodstein.
Gos and David introducing the InterMine workshop. pic.twitter.com/5HIdwgpUKE
— InterMine (@intermineorg) March 30, 2017
Josh and I followed up by introducing BlueGenes, the UI we’ve been working on to replace InterMine’s older JSP-based UI. You can view Josh’s slide deck , try out a live demo, or browse / check out the source on GitHub.
Next came one of my favourite parts: short talks from InterMiners.
Short community talks
Doppelgangers – Joel Richardson, MGI
Joel gave a great presentation about Doppelgangers in InterMine – that is, occasionally, depending on your data sets and config, you can end up with duplicate or strange / incomplete InterMine objects in your mine. He follows up with explanations of the root causes and mitigation methods – a great resource for any InterMiner who is working in data source integration!
Genetic data in Mines – Sam Hokin, NCGR/LegFed
Next up was Sam’s talk about his various beany mines, including CowpeaMine, which has only genetics data, rather than the more typical InterMine genomic data. He’s also implemented several custom data visualisations on gene report pages – check out the slides or mines for more details.
Canvasexpress custom displayer in BeanMine written by @sammyjava pic.twitter.com/2ZohYzwGMT
— InterMine (@intermineorg) March 30, 2017
JBrowse and Inter-mine communication – Vivek Krishnakumar, JCVI
Vivek focused on some great cross-InterMine collaborations (slides here), including the technical challenges integrating JBrowse into InterMine, as well as a method to link to other InterMines using synteny rather than InterMine’s typical homology approach.
The Jbrowse fixes for InterMine are in versions 1.6.8+. Great to see Sergio, @justincc and @vivekkrish collaborating on it. pic.twitter.com/d82tdo8154
— InterMine (@intermineorg) March 30, 2017
InterMine at JGI – Joe Carlson, Phytozome, JGI
Joe has the privilege to run the biggest InterMine, covering (currently) 72 data sets on 69 organisms. Compared to most InterMines, this is massive! Unsurprisingly, this scale comes with a few hitches many of the other mines don’t encounter. Joe’s slides give a great overview of the problems you might encounter in a large-scale InterMine and their solutions.
Joe talks about how PhytoMine handles having multiple versions of the same genome – not something InterMine natively handles. pic.twitter.com/hL40IdGbih
— InterMine (@intermineorg) March 30, 2017
Afternoon sessions
FAIR and the semantic web – Daniela & Justin
After a yummy lunch at a nearby cafe, Justin introduced the concept of FAIR, and discussed InterMine’s plans for a FAIRer future (slides). Discussion topics included:
- How to make stable URIs (InterMine object IDs are transient and will change between builds)
- Enhanced embedded metadata in webpages and query results (data provenance, licencing)
- Better Findablility (the F in FAIR) by registering InterMine resources with external registries
- RDF generation / SPARQL querying
This was followed up by Daniela’s introduction to RDF and SPARQL, which provided a great basic intro to the two concepts in an easily-understood manner. I really loved these slides, and I reckon they’d be a good introduction for anyone interested in learning more about what RDF and SPARQL are, whether or not you’re interested in InterMine .
Extending the InterMine Core Data Model – Sergio
Sergio ran the final session, “Extending the InterMine Core Data Model“. Shared models allow for easier cross-InterMine queries, as demoed in the GO tool prototype:
This discussion raised several interesting talking points:
- Should model extensions be created via community RFC?
- If so, who is involved? Developers, community members, curators, other?
- Homologue or homolog? Who knew a simple “ue” could cause incompatibility problems? Most InterMine use the “ue” variation, with the exception of PhytoMine. An answer to this problem was presented in the “friendly mine” section of Vivek’s talk earlier in the day.
Another great output was Siddartha Basu’s gist on setting up InterMine – outlining some pain points and noting the good bits.
Most of us met up for dinner afterwards at Kevin’s Noodle House – highly recommended for meat eaters, less so for veggies.
Only one statement represents the relation between the gene and the organism (that one containing the predicate hasOrganism), the others describe the properties of the two entities.
InterMine 
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