The AAAI conference finished last Thursday, here are some highlights and papers that might be worth reading if you are interested in building and / or using a more “intelligent” (and possibly semantic) web in bioinformatics.

Tim Berners-Lee delivered his one hour keynote at AAAI yesterday on the Semantic Web, after an introduction from Yolanda Gil. Tim gave an impassioned speech covering the last 16 years of the web and discussed the future of sharing data on the web using persistent URI's, RDF and OWL. At the end of it all, there were some searching questions from Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google Labs.

We present a novel approach to describe and reason about stateless information processing services. It can be seen as an extension of standard descriptions which makes explicit the relationship between inputs and outputs and takes into account OWL ontologies to fix the meaning of the terms used in a service description. This allows us to define a notion of matching between services which yields high precision and recall for service location. We explain why matching is decidable, and provide biomedical example services to illustrate the utility of our approach. In Proceedings of the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06) and Eighteenth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-06) Conference, Boston, MA, USA, July 16-20 (special track on AI and the Web)

a AAAI workshop about analysing weblogs, march 27-29, 2006