Present

Greg, Jason, Nitin, Ross, Scott

Action Items

1. Scott will work on the slot for missing value codes (see below on missing values)
2. Nitin will work with the data samples from ross (who finally provided them!)
3. Nitin will continue to sort out the packaging problem which is preventing the R package from being generated
4. Ross will continue to talk with Michael O'Connell from Insightful (see below)
5. Greg will ask Sourceforge admin to zorch the CVS_Sandbox directory, and rename genetics-ng to genetics.ng

Previous Action Items

Nitin has run into packaging problems - possibly a source code error or a package check code error?

Ross had forgotten to pass on the sample data - fixed now

See below on representing missing values

Missing values

Now generally agreed that individual missing alleles should be representable - not just missing genotypes. Scott recommended a slot with missing value codings for a given data set to enable this to be done most flexibly. He will add this to the class definition.

Insightful

In submitting his BISTI R01 (http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PAR-03-106.html), Ross had discussions with Michael O'Connell from Insightful about a potential collaboration. Insightful has developed S+Gene under an SBIR and have an affy module based on a Bioconductor package. Michael mentioned the possibility of some way of giving S+Gene to this project (perhaps through the R01 if it gets funded...) but indicated that Insightful would want some sort of certainty on the commercial opportunities from resulting code. Some developers may not be willing to sign on to anything other than the LGPL and may find additional licensing restrictions unacceptable.

Seemed to be general agreement that this was a potentially interesting proposal, worthy of further discussion and consideration - even under some kind of dual license or other special arrangement. The absurdity of Pfizer or Bristol-Meyer Squibb paying for something it had already paid people to work on was pointed out. The question of how valuable the S+Gene contribution might really be was raised - everyone should take a look at it if possible to see what it includes.

Ross will continue to work on this and report back..