2001 Meeting

Sharing Experiences and Spreading Best Practice

26 July 2001

This, the fourth annual bio-Ontologies meeting has been sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals, for whose support we are grateful.

Organised by Carole Goble and Robert Stevens (co-chairs); Peter Karp, Pat Hayes, Robin McEntire, Richard Chen and Eric Neumann

About the Workshop

We would like to invite you to the fourth Annual Bio-Ontologies Meeting (Bio-Ontologies 2001), on July 26th in Copenhagen, Denmark. This is immediately after the ISMB-01 July 21-25 in Copenhagen.

The programme is now available for the Bio-Ontologies meeting. We have a key-note speaker, Alan Flett from Semantic Edge, who will describe experience of the use of ontology in the business world. We have three invited speakers, who will discuss the roles of ontologies in medical informatics; text analysis and the analysis of gene transcription data. We have ten short talks selected from abstracts submitted to the meeting. An innovation for this year is a panel discussion with ontologists from industry, biology, computer science.....

The Bio-Ontologies meeting is co-located with ISMB in Tivoli Gardens. The Bio-Ontologies meeting is in NIMB (room called Lumbysalen). All registrants receive a map of Tivoli where NIMB is clearly shown via the mail. Most registrants who are already attending ISMB will have their Bio-Ontology meeting badges already via their ISMB registration, they need to wear these on the day. Registrants should come through the NIMB entrance on the 26th. If they are only attending Bio-Ontologies they can register here also.

The goal of this consortium is the identification and promotion of a practical set of technologies that will aid in the knowledge management and exchange of concepts and representations in the life sciences. The first meeting took place in Montreal in 1998, and made clear the general interest and support people had for ontologies in the life sciences. The following year in Heidelberg we discussed ontology exchange and presented ontologies currently under development. the third meeting, in La Jolla, California, USA, continued this theme, reporting several new ontologies and presenting up-dates on existing ontologies.

Many in the group have been active since our last meeting. The community now has considerable experience in the development and deployment of ontologies in the life sciences, so it is appropriate for us to take stock and reflect.  So the theme for this year's meeting is Sharing Experiences and Spreading Best Practice. The idea is that we share not only the results of our labours but how we got there, and what we wished we had known while we did it.

Topics that will be discussed include:

• Shared experiences in using ontology tools, development methodologies, comparing ontologies, and reusing other people's ontologies;

• The latest in ontology languages and ontology exchange languages, including an update on the Ontology Inference Layer (OIL);

• Ontologies produced by members from various genomics and life-science efforts;

• Specific uses of ontologies in research and drug discovery especially  pre-competitive ontologies for the industry;

• Updates on ontology development in general.

Venue

The meeting will be held on July 26th in Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen. Attendees are expected to make their own arrangements for travel and accommodation (we assume most will simply extend their bookings for ISMB). For more information on hotels with special ISMB conference rates, see ISMB Hotels.

Workshop Details

The day-long seminar will be divided into two sections:

• A key-note address followed by invited speakers on the theme of the workshop, followed by

• A series of 20 minute talks selected from respondents to this call for abstracts, covering a range of topics that may be wider than the theme of the workshop.

• Some intended results of the fourth meeting will be:

  • Establish a user community for sharing experiences with designing and building ontologies for the Life Sciences;

  • Enlist support from the Knowledge Management community for tools and methodologies to aid our ontology efforts;

  • Create a permanent portal for the exchange of ontologies, ontology building tools and relationships with other organizations engaged in similar ontology-building tasks;

  • Establish a consortium for promoting and sharing open-source ontologies in the Life Sciences.

Registration is on line and the registration page is now available. It will be possible to register at the ISMB conference and on the day of the meeting itself. All registrants who are also registering for ISMB will be registered for the satellite meeting on the 26th at the same time. Those that are only attending on the day will be able to register onsite. ISMB itself has reached capacity registration, but the Bio-Ontologies meeting has up to 200 places, of which approximately 140 have been filled.

Deadlines

1 June 2001
Please submit abstracts to
Robert.Stevens@cs.man.ac.uk