The logo was released with much fanfare by the W3C and to some consternation of the web design community. It not only represented the HTML specification itself, but also as an umbrella emblem for a collection of modern web techniques with semantic markup, offline storage, push notifications and CSS 3 among them. Some cried fowl that this was a dilution of the importance of each technique, whilst others were more philosophical.

As it happens, the W3C later clarified their position, but something lodged in my mind: if there were a logo for informatics, what techniques, skills and best practices would it embrace? What would informaticians want to stand behind?

Informatics is all about knowledge. It aims to introduce clarity where there is confusion, to drive understanding through computational methods. But it's more than the sum of its parts.

The cocktail of informatics is two parts programming, one part data modeling, one part statistical reasoning and three parts communication, and an informatician (or data scientist, as the cool kids are calling themselves these days) must employ a wide variety of skills to push forward scientific understanding.

It's also a discipline. A profession. A craft.

With that in mind, what core tenants and techniques would a master informatician define themselves by, or that an informatics newcomer would strive to realise? If we were to make little HTML-style validation badges, for what would they be awarded?

These goals are complimentary rather than mutually exclusive. For example, delivering informatics solutions which follow software best practices are more likely to be maintained and remain available. These goals are a means to an end, and their application can result in high quality, reproducible, high impact research.

My aim here, dear reader, is to highlight the very best practice for modern informatics research. Standards we can all stand beside. We can always do more to raise the state of the art, but I would consider these little badges to be the key factors to accelerating research and pre-requisits for the sort of high quality, available, re-usable science we can be proud of.

This post isn't specifically about what a logo for informatics might look like, in terms of styling or design, but more about promoting best practices through a recognisable marque. That said, it's worth taking a moment to consider the profile of informatics in the wider research ecosystem.

Traditionally, informatics has suffered from something of an identity crisis. The webbed-fingered step child of computer science and laboratory, the role of the informatician has not been an easy fit into the wider world of research. Until recently.

As the role of data becomes more pronounced across research domains, and as the volume of that data continues to increase, the informatician is playing an increasingly central, recognised role. The odd melange of knowledge and skills that once made informatics difficult to place are now the exact mix of theory and application needed to push research forward.

It's time we started to dress accordingly.