WBConfCall 2017.03.16-Agenda and Minutes

Agenda

Adam worked on external links in Datomic
Would like to make the Datomic schema more consistent for external links
Some links for accession numbers are text fields, others point to the accession class
Hinxton will work on simplifying the model

Chris and Mary Ann asking for section drafts by early next week so we can pull chapter together and make it consistent

Paul S. asking about what we know about business use of WormBase
Todd: some corporate users, not a huge number; probably tend to pull one big data dump into their own LIMS, and then we don't get web usage stats
Are there any trends of swinging from academia/public research towards private/corporate research? Not currently clear
We could possibly look for corporate/private sector support
Could setup WormBase as an LLC so that WB can receive donations from companies? Todd could setup in an afternoon
What about restricting access to commercial users? Possible, but comes with management overhead (fixed cost?)
Maybe have a pilot project, first reaching out to a few companies, and see what the interest is
Karen: Nemametrix has been asking about how to donate to WB; we could certainly begin dialog with them
Caltech pages have donation buttons throughout their site; could we leverage the Caltech system for use for WB donations?
- Caltech may take a (significant?) cut

All WB funding comes, currently, from two countries (US, UK), yet we have 50+ labs in China that are major users of the resource
Could possibly get more funding/support from overseas/other countries

OMIM started this in the last year
FlyBase about to start similar approach as well
Raises public consciousness about funding; something to consider
Would it be good to request an allotment of discretionary funds to be used for supporting WB?

Ranjana set the workshop agenda to organizers
- Currently we're slated for only one workshop; haven't heard back about having a second workshop
- We may have to force everything into a single day workshop
WormBase will have booth, as will Micropublications
Nemametrix willing to provide swag (mini-book with micropublications)
- Book will have several types of micropublications (small datasets, negative results, etc.)

In WS258 adding gene classes as a class to WormMine
Fleshing out some classes that already exist, variations etc.
Not being used much right now
Have discussed in past powering simple queries in WormBase using WormMine as the backend
Could possibly build a user-friendly query builder that sits on top of WormMine
We could have page dedicated to commonly requested data
There is a new Intermine interface coming out soon
There may be a new backend as well (running off graph database?)