Meeting Minutes 1 August 2007

Present: Randall Britten, James Lawson, Poul Nielsen, Andrew Miller, Matt Halstead, Peter Hunter Apologies: Catherine Lloyd, Sarala Dissanayake

Andrew has been working on the refactoring of the CellML Code Generation Service. It is almost finished, but there are still a few technical issues to resolve before he can move on to something else.

James has been through all models to evaluate which ones should have the highest priority to work on - he has chosen a few which he has been working on.

He has been creating sessions as he goes, but has been having problems when there are too many traces on the graphs. Peter thinks it is because when he adds sodium everything else ends up being too small to see. Matt suggested that one option would be to have a normalisation option which lets you see each trace individually normalised. It was decided that this would be worth adding to the tracker but it would probably stay as a very low priority for a long time.

There was also some discussion about the complexity of creating sessions for submission to the repository - at present the presence of absolute file:// URLs means that the process requires some manual editing - this is something which makes it difficult for the community to do. The repository might be able to help resolve this.

There was also a discussion about the addition of cmeta:ids - this is something that is required for sessions to work, but which many models do not have consistently. To make it work PCEnv adds in the cmeta:ids where they are required, but these need to be saved and re-uploaded to the repository. Matt is working on getting them automatically added on all components and variables, which will resolve this issue.

Matt says Sarala is working on representing the Hodgkin-Huxley model in CellML + BioPaX. The biggest difficulty is in representing the abstraction as it was described at the time, rather than to do a post hoc justification for the model and add in a contemporary explanation of it in order to represent it.

Peter has met with Oxford University Press about a CellML journal for publishing models (which they are very interested in). Nature also has a journal 'Preceedings' which might have some overlap with the goals of this.

Peter has met with some members of the IEEE / EMBS biological signal processing community - they are interested in using models to help interpret signals. Peter has been discussing some potential collaboration with them.

Peter also met with someone from IBM who was interested in getting some research going in NZ. Peter suggested that there could be a co-funded person to help establish ties between NZ IBM and the institute, perhaps working with Matt & Poul. Matt indicated he might be interested in working with them on high performance RDF data-stores.