2003 Meeting - Brisbane

From Text to Ontology and Back Again

28 June 2003

Organised by Robert Stevens and Robin McEntire(co-chairs),

Meeting Home Page Meeting Programme

About the Workshop

We would like to invite you to the sixth Annual Bio-Ontologies Meeting (Bio-Ontologies 2003), on June 28th in Brisbane, Australia. This is immediately after the ISMB2003 June 29- July 3 in Brisbane. the Bio-Ontologies meeting is co-located with ISMB 2003 and is supported by the ISCB.

Our theme this year is the inter-relationship between ontology and text. Much of the biological knowledge in our community is held in electronic texts as some sort of natural language. Unfortunately, this vast resource of knowledge is largely inaccessible computationally. Ontologies are a way in which we can describe our biological knowledge in a computationally amenable form. Ontologies can provide a terminology for analysing text; provide guidance to synonyms etc; and provide relationships between concepts identified in texts. Thus, the areas of text analysis and ontologies have a lot in common. As interest grows in both fields within the community, we would like to take this opportunity to use ontologies and text analysis as our theme for the sixth annual bio-ontologies meeting.

In accordance with this year's theme, we are pleased to welcome a guest speaker from the BioLink Text Mining SIG running on Friday 27th June, the day prior to this meeting. Christian Blaschke, of the Protein Design Group, will talk about the interplay between the worlds of text analysis and mining with that of ontologies: Text analysis can help us build ontologies and ontologies can help in the analysis of text. Christian's talk will help us to give an overview and introduction to the day's talks.

The bio.ontologies email list will let uou send messages to people interested in bio-ontologies; you can also subscribe and unsubscribe.

Meeting Agenda

Priority will be given to presentations that follow the meeting's theme, but we are not restricted to these areas. Topics that will be discussed include, but are not restricted to:

• 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;

• Ontologies produced by members from various genomics and life-science efforts and updates in those ontologies already in development;

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

• Updates on ontology development in general.

Workshop Format

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

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

• Panel sessions made up from the day's speakers s well as invitees.

Deadlines

30 April 2003

Please submit abstracts to

Robert.Stevens@cs.man.ac.uk. Abstracts should be the equivalent of two pages of A4 paper (approximately 1000 words). the abstract should include:

1. Title

2. Name

3. Affiliation

4. Web address for further details

5. Email address for author

6. Text describing the ontology or related work

We would like all ontologies presented to be available for viewing by members of the community.

Venue

The meeting will be co-located with the main ISMB meeting. Location: Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre (BCEC), Mezzanine M1. Attendees will be expected to make their own arrangements for accommodation. The ISMB pages have accomodation details. Note that the meeting will be held before the main ISMB meeting: Saturday, June 28, 2003, 09:00 - 17:30.

Registration and Cost

Costs are in US Dollars:

• Academic and Government:$90.00

• Student: $75.00

• Corporate: $100.00

You can register for this or any SIG via the ISMB registration site. It is possible to register for a SIG without registering for ISMB itself. It is also possible to register on the day of the meeting.