What's in a name?

I stumbled across this press release from EBI today, via Biology News Net. It's basically about how the EU is giving half a million euros (~ $600,000 USD?) to a project which will work out what kind of bioinformatics / medical informatics crossover projects should be funded in the future. The way that they're doing this is to interview experts in the field - which is fair enough - and (to paraphrase) by identifying and analysing the content of relevant literature by "bibliometric and data-mining" means to identify "areas of opportunity"- which sounds a bit dodgy, but hey, I don't really know how projects like this usually work. I'd have thought you'd get much better information for less work by sticking to the interviews.

Anyway, to come to the point of this post... the full title of the project is Synergies in Medical Informatics and Bioinformatics. The snappy acronym? SYMBIOmatics. It's a good example of a great bioinformatics project name:

• Mid-acronym change in capitalization brutally offends word flow, forcing readers to pay more attention to the project description in long, boring documents
  
• Weighs in at twelve letters, which heftily highlights the importance of the project. All important projects have really long acronyms
• Bit in capitals infringes commercial trademarks (of a UK sports turf cleaning company and Poland's largest organic fruit and vegetable distributor, amongst others)
• Sounds faintly futuristic (the -matics part), would have been better if it sounded like an animal or something which could be used as the project logo, ideally a monkey smoking a pipe as I have some great clipart of that on my hard drive already, but never mind...
• Shortens words by "crazy person collage" method, reducing Bioinformatics to BIOmatics, for example, while Medical Informatics becomes simply M. This has to be done when you have a great pun, smoking monkey reference or far-out future-word like "SYMBIOmatics" in mind and need to fit the project name into it
• For EU funding bonus points is universally nonsensical, thus neatly sidestepping the EU preference for acronyms that work in more than one major language

Bioinformatics is a bit too much like mainstream IT when it comes to crap acronyms. At least we haven't gotten to the point where database releases are named (it's still Ensembl 33, not Ensembl Yukon or Longsteer or anything). Actually, didn't it use to be EnsEMBL, or am I making that up? I refer you to rule #1 above...

p.s I'm sure that the Symbiomatics project itself is perfectly respectable, good luck to them etc... it's the name I don't like.