Bio-Ontologies
The Bio-Ontologies workshop has been a satellite meeting to the annual ISMB conference since 1998 as a Special Interest Group. Bio-Ontologies is well eastablished as one of the key meetings for dissemination of the 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 for providing computationally accessible annotation, or standard data models for complex microarray or pathway knowledge.
However, as highlighted by last years meeting, users of ontologies within the life sciences, are facing issues of scalability, expressivity and best practice. While ontologies provide a mechanism for automating the handling of knowledge, we still do not have mechanisms for automating the building and handling of ontologies.
Bio-Ontologies Programme Committee
The programme committee this year are:
- Helen Parkinson, European Bioinformatics Institute.
- Judith Blake, The Jackson Laboratories.
- Olivier Bodenreider, National Library of Medicine.
- Cliff Joslyn, Los Alamos National Laboratory.
- Midori Harris, European Bioinformatics Institute.
in addition to the organisers of Bio-Ontologies.