=Overview=

Most of the discussions at this hackathon deal with technology issues relating to interoperability. A few of the discussions are discuss OpenBio* "platform specific implementations" - language APIs (BioRuby, BioJava, BioPerl, etc.), web service protocols (BioMoby ''et. al.'') and database implementations (i.e. BioSQL).  A general issue relating to harmonization of community semantics or, at least, establishing a community process for semantics management, is recognized. This OpenSpace discussion is targeting this issue for further progress.

The broader scope of this discussion is titled '''OpenBioSemantics''' rather than simply '''Ontology'''.

=Proceedings=

=Summary of Day 1 Discussions (11th Feb. Afternoon AcademyHills)= 

==Preliminary Observations==

Cathedral versus the Bazaar: the global community of bioinformatics are struggling with the issue of semantics, and various formalisms are currently being used to capture such semantics, i.e.

* Object models: expressed in UML (e.g. OMG style "Model Driven Architecture" using Unified Modeling Language (UML))
* Ontology initiatives
** OBO format driven: e.g. Gene Ontology (GO), Sequence Ontology (SO), etc.
** OWL format initiatives: OBI
* XML Schema driven languages: EMBRACE, BioCase/Tapir, etc.
* Common Database Schemata and Queries: BioSQL, Generic Model Organism (GMOD) Chado, [wiki:http://www.icis.cgiar.org International Crop Information System], etc.