= 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 WS-I, !BioCase, Tapir, etc.
 * '''Common Database Schemata and Queries:''' BioSQL, [http://www.gmod.org Generic Model Organism (GMOD) Chado], [http://www.icis.cgiar.org International Crop Information System], etc.