[MOBY-l] Eighth Bio-Ontologies Meeting: Programme Now Available

[Phillip Lord]

The Eighth Annual Bio-Ontologies Meeting
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Key Information
===============        

Organisers: Robert Stevens(1), Phillip Lord(1),
      Robin McEntire(2), and James.A.Butler(2)

(1) School of Computer Science, University of Manchester
(2) GlaxoSmithKline

Website:  http://bio-ontologies.man.ac.uk
Location: Detroit, Michigan
Submission Deadline: 29th April
      
Main Conference: http://www.iscb.org/ismb2005


Programme
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This year has seen an unprecedented rise in the number of
submissions, which has resulted in a particularly excellent
programme. 

Highlights include:

Keynote Address by Mark Musen

A Panel Session with 

Mark Musen
Larry Hunter
Judith Blake
Eric Neumann

As a result of the increase in number of submissions this years, as
well as 12 podium presentations, there will be 11 posters.

Full details are available at 

http://bio-ontologies.man.ac.uk
http://bio-ontologies.man.ac.uk/talks_programme.html
http://bio-ontologies.man.ac.uk/poster_programme.html





General Information
===================

The Bio-Ontologies workshop has been a satellite meeting to the annual
ISMB conference since 1998, and is now operated as a Special Interest
Group at the ISMB Conference. Bio-Ontologies is well established as
one of the key meetings for dissemination of latest information and
research on ontologies in the life sciences and has drawn the key
researchers in the field.

Ontologies provide a mechanism for organising, sharing and reconciling
data. Within recent years there has been a great deal of interest in
the use of ontologies within bioinformatics, particularly in providing
computationally accessible annotation, or standard data models for
complex data for microarray or pathway information.

Meetings such as last years workshop and SOFG have made it clear that
there are many important uses of ontologies and a clear realisation of
the importance of implementing mechanisms for integrating source
ontologies rather than duplicating effort or causing confusion by
extending a given ontology to include everything.

However, with the increase in scope and use of ontologies within
bioinformatics, issues of scalability, expressivity and best practices
for modelling are becoming more important. We are particularly
interested, therefore, in work involving multiple source ontologies,
and which cut across the different levels of granularity implicit
within biological systems.

BioOntologies is an informal workshop. Submissions will be reviewed by
the programme committee. A number of talks will be invited for ***full
publication*** as papers in Comparative and Functional Genomics
(see http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jissue/109860809 for
last years papers)