Teresa (Terri) Attwood

Bio

I'm currently Professor of Bioinformatics at Manchester University. Over the years, research interests in protein sequence analysis and family classification led to the development of databases like PRINTS and InterPro, and of software tools like CINEMA and Utopia; a subsequent interest in semantic integration of research data with scholarly publications led to the creation of Utopia Documents. I'm a keen educator and trainer: I wrote the first introductory bioinformatics text-book; my third book was published in September 2016. In 2012, as EMBnet's Chair, I led the initiative to create the GOBLET Foundation (the Global Organisation for Bioinformatics Learning, Education and Training). I'm now GOBLET's Chair, and lead the ELIXIR-EXCELERATE subtask developing ELIXIR's Training e-Support System, TeSS.

More information about my projects:
http://www.bioinf.man.ac.uk/dbbrowser/
http://utopiadocs.com
https://tess.elixir-europe.org

Title

The Road to Utopia: challenges in linking literature and research data

Abstract

This presentation describes a personal journey in which a lifetime preoccupation with protein sequences and databases led to the unlikely development of Utopia Documents, a 'smart' PDF reader (http://getutopia.com), and a pioneering project to create the ‘Semantic Biochemical Journal’. Our quest was motivated by a desire to better link data and software tools with scientific articles, to soften the boundaries between databases and papers. During an era of ‘big data’, when more articles are being published and more data are being produced than humans can readily assimilate, Utopia Documents offers a new paradigm for extracting nuggets of information from the barrage of published scientific information that now assaults us every day. Examples will be given from the Lazarus project, in which Utopia harnesses the power of the ‘crowd’ to capture asserted facts and relationships automatically, as a simple side-effect of reading and interacting with scientific articles.