WIKIMEDIA, W.REBELThe Biological Expression Language (BEL) may be on the road to becoming a ubiquitous mode of communication among life scientists. OpenBEL, the open-source software project that seeks to transform life science data into something akin to HTML coding language, has partnered with The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit technology consortium that promotes the growth and development of the open-source operating system Linux.
The marriage should provide a boost to OpenBEL, which is already used by many in industry and academia to enable better collaboration on big data projects, such as drug development. The hope is that the nonprofit can do for OpenBEL what it is doing for Linux, which has become lingua franca among collaborative software developers and hackers alike.
“All of us are smarter collectively than any one of us is by ourselves, and Linux is one of the greatest examples of that principle,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation, in a statement. “OpenBEL represents an amazing opportunity for openness and collaboration to advance science, and we’re happy to impart our knowledge of collaborative software development to leaders in the life sciences industry.”
