[Vp-integration-subgroup] Never ending ideas... (Was Re: Recap from joint meeting regarding the white paper)

[William Waites]

> 3. You want to add another reference. Let us please wait until the review is done for more modifications - otherwise this will never end 

I have somewhat this same feeling — there’s a lot more to be said about the topics that are only lightly and briefly dealt with in this paper. That’s fine, we can’t talk about everything in one article. The present circumstances in the world are such that there is some urgency to putting a stake in the ground that says, “look, ideas from engineering and experience from systems biology are really useful for understanding things like pandemics and we need to think more broadly than traditional infectious disease modelling."

It’s super promising that so many of us have this same feeling of having more that we want to say. What can we do to capture this energy? Do we produce a book? There’s obviously standards work ahead, maybe we’re not at the point of being able to articulate standards yet? There is some work on making a collection of infectious disease models in the Microsoft+Github+Royal Society+EPCC but it is proceeding extremely slowly and is not really thinking at the level of higher-order operations on models which is what we want, I think.

There’s probably some discussion to be had around central concepts like parallel and sequential composition — I had a brief exchange with James Glazier about this in a comment in the google doc where it seemed to me that we had slightly different sets of definitions in mind. I don’t think there was disagreement but if we’re going to talk about eventually producing things like standards, it’s important that we agree on the precise meaning of core concepts.

What way should we arrive at these precise meanings? Would it be useful for me to take a stab at writing down precisely yet readably what I think they mean and then we can iteratively improve upon it?

Cheers,
-w