Dalke Scientific invitated to the Open Source Bioinformatics Hackathon

October 16

Yesterday Electric Genetics and O'Reilly & Associates announced their selection of Andrew Dalke, Jeff Chang, and Brad Chapman as attendees of the invitation-only Open Source Bioinformatics Hackathon. Andrew and Jeff started the Biopython project and all three are associated with Dalke Scientific Software.

The purpose of the hackathon, says Electric Genetics' Tania Hide, is "to bring together key bioinformatics open source developers in a series of two focused face-to-face meetings to implement a step improvement to infrastructure and raise standardisation opportunities across at least the Bio* language projects, and hopefully further into bioinformatics as a whole." The first meeting will occur at the O'Reilly Bioinformatics Conference in Tucson this January and the second in Capetown, South Africa a month later.

Says founder Andrew Dalke, "this is continued recognition both of the quality and importance of the Biopython project and of the dire need for cross-platform and cross-language integration in bioinformatics. If we all support the same data models and data access methods we help bioinformatics by letting researchers choose the right tool for the job, rather than the only tool."