The Eighth Annual Bio-Ontologies Meeting

Organised by Robert Stevens,Robin McEntire, Phillip Lord, and James.A.Butler
Thanks to Special Reviewer, David Benton.
Location: Michigan
Date: June 24, 2005
Submission Deadline: 29th April 2005

Introduction

This years workshop has now concluded. Thanks to all who attended and, in particular, the keynote, panelists and those who presented papers.

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.

A number of presentations from this years meeting will be invited to submit full papers for publication in Comparative and Functional Genomics following the successful reception of last years publication.

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, number 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.

Submissions for the Bio-Ontologies meeting are now open.

Suitable topics include but are not restricted to:

Biological Applications of Ontologies.
Reports on Newly Developed or Existing Bio-Ontologies.
Tools for Developing Ontologies.
Use of Semantic Web technologies in BioInformatics
The implications of Bio-Ontologies or the Semantic Web for the drug discovery process
Current Research In Ontology Languages and its implication for Bio-Ontologies