Perhaps 2015 could be qualified as the year in which BioJS began to truly be an established international initiative. Some numbers are in order. For example:
- There are 83 unique code contributors to components in the registry
- Functionality in the registry does not only provide visualisation any more, it also provides data analysis functionality. Figure 1 below shows a wordle of all keywords used to categorise BioJS components in the registry. Not only scientific topics (bioinformatics, biology) or molecular entities (protein, gene) are shown, there are also parsers, streams, installers, etc.
Figure 1: Wordle showing frequency of keywords used to describe the functionality of components included in the BioJS registry
- The current number of BioJS components is 122. As Figure 2 shows, we have almost doubled the number of existing components in the registry by adding 54 new ones.
Figure 2: Graph showing the cumulative growth of BioJS components during 2015. From a total of 122, as many as 54 have been added to the registry during the past 365 days, almost doubling the number of existing components in the BioJs registry.
- 2015 also saw the First BioJS Conference. All the talks are available via our BioJS YouTube Channel. Here are some numbers about this conference:
- 15 invited speakers
- 50 attendees (Figure 3)
- Companies represented: Oxford Nanopore, Bayer, Intel, Row Analytics, Repositive, F1000Research, Cambridgene, Eagle Genomics, EdgeLeap, eLife
Figure 3: Picture of attendees to the First BioJS Conference, held 3-4th July at The Genome Analysis Centre, Norwich, UK, directly preceding the Galaxy Community Conference.
- Other outreach events in 2015
- 2 Hackathons, one co-located with the Galaxy Community Conference on July 4. Another one following the Biological Visualisation (BiVi) Conference on December 4th.
- Presentations of BioJS at
- BiVi (4/Dec)
- The Regional Student Group for Bioinformatics in the UK (7/Oct)
- ISMB’s Technology Track (13/Jul)
- The Max Plank Institute (14/Apr)
Things to come for 2015
So, we are in full swing and have plans for an exciting year 2016 full of activities. So far these are the ones we have planned:
- BioJS Tutorial at VizBi (Heidelberg, 8th March). Figure 4 below shows our tremendously smart and dedicated team who will be teaching this workshop
Figure 4: Our dedicated team of instructors at VizBi 2016.
- JavaScript for Visualisation, a workshop led by Tim Ruffles, (21-22nd April, The Genome Analysis Centre, Norwich)
- BioJS Tutorial at the Boston Festival of Genomics (27th June)
- BioJS conference (end of June)
How to be involved / keep in the loop
- BioJS Monthly call: we have a monthly call every 1st Thursday of the month at 4pm BST, 11am EST. This is the “core” mail list for people wishing to influence community decisions. Please send me an email if you’d like to join this list. The email is biojavascript@googlegroups.com
- BioJS developers maillist: this is a general maillist for people loosely interested in keeping informed. The email is biojs@googlegroups.com
- You can also follow us via Twitter @BiojsLibrary.