CellML Road Map. Peter is working on the next draft of the roadmap. Changes will include: addition of Matt's work on ontologies, link to Matt's tool development site, Shane's comments, and suggestions Carey has made. Peter's changes are intended to produce a document that reflects the feelings of everyone, and to offer a more comprehensive review of the work that's being done in the Institute. Peter also mentioned that we have funding to employ more people to work on tools, and this document will help us to determine what kind of people should be employed, i.e. what skills they should possess. Another purpose of the Road Map is to give other groups an idea of our direction - Poul will distribute the RoadMap at the upcoming EMBS meeting.

There seemed to be concern that all of Peter's changes would be incorporated into the CellML Road Map. Some of the changes are perhaps beyond the scope of the CellML project and are more in the domain of the Physiome Project. If the CellML Road Map is to become the Physiome Project Road Map, Shane and David B suggested that it should also contain a statement about the state of models and how they are going to link up. Peter caught on and joked about including proposals about instrumentation and about the nurturing of students, the point being where do we end it? David B advocated indicating in the title of the Road Map that this Road Map was just for the database (model storage) side of the Physiome Project. Poul disagreed saying it was a structure that allowed people to add to it and we'll just detail the parts we want to.

Autumn's update: The developer server website generation process is almost up and going. This will allow anyone from Team CellML to update the website when I've left, and means that they won't have to wait for Srdan to make the changes for them.

I've put a link to CESE on the website. Both David N and I downloaded it to have a play around with it. There's a shell script to run to translate CellML to the Java input, but I couldn't figure out how to import that code into the main environment. Not sure if I just wasn't looking hard enough at the documentation. If I have a chance before I leave, I'll contact Sergey about it.

I am working on adding keywords to the CellML model database. Before Catherine left she added keyword metadata to all of the CellML models. Currently the repository search form keyword entry searches all the rest of the fields for that word (author and title fields, for example). The keywords will just provide a greater range of options. Peter asked if these keywords match words in the Anatomy Ontology. No. The field we want to have match the Ontology is the bio_entity metadata field. The syncing of the bio_entity field and the Anatomy Ontology still has to be done.

The mailing lists are really, truly fixed. David N and I know this because now we're getting all the spam.

Peter's update: Had a concern that the cellml.org website was not loading properly in Netscape 4.75 because of the browser's inability to display style sheets. After consulting with Srdan about the popularity of the browser (3% of browsers worldwide and decreasing), we've decided not to target website changes to this particular browser. However, since half of that 3% is in the Institute, Peter will talk to Tiong (IT) about making Firefox available for the SGI machines.

Dr. John Colyer from the University of Leeds has contacted Peter regarding a possible collaboration with our group. Colyer's research group has experience in protein phosphorylation based signalling in cardiac muscle and are wanting to build a database and mathematical model (possibly stored in CellML) of protein phosphorylation events following stimulation of cardiac myocytes (more or less). Peter will meet up with him later in the year to further discuss this new possibly mutually beneficial relationship.

Matt's update: The tool development site has been updated to reflect changes in the Road Map and discussions between Matt and Carey about the direction of their tools.

Has spent most of the past week on student-related tasks (marking, etc.). His visualization project student has most of the Java CellML 1.1 library ready. The student is adding a test unit that loads models from the CellML repository. When that's completed, the library will be available on SourceForge. The other project students are waiting to get a copy of the Content MathML editor from Stephanie. Poul will e-mail her on this matter.

Concern about access to the Year Four Project Students' Projects: The projects are available on the internal CVS repository, which is fine. We don't mind people having access to the projects especially as the students need feedback, but because they are working on student projects for a grade, changes to the code can't be committed by anyone other than the students. What to do about this? Proposed solution: Make snapshots of the software available elsewhere to the rest of the Institute.