Resource Ontology Discussion Group News

2-day NCBO Training Course in Biomedical Ontology

David Kennedy — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 8:50:35 GMT

A two-day intensive training course in biomedical ontology will be held in Buffalo on 12-13 April, 2008 under the auspices of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology. The course will provide an
introductory survey of methods and an overview of current developments and best practices in ontology in the life sciences. No prior knowledge of ontology is presupposed. All sessions will be
highly interactive and designed to be of interest to those with a background in medicine or biology.

Further details are available here:
http://www.bioontology.org/wiki/index.php/Introduction_to_Biomedical_Ontologies

Workshop: OWL: Experiences and Directions

David Kennedy — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 4:10:36 GMT

OWLED 2008 DC
OWL: Experiences and Directions
Announcement and Call for Participation
Fourth International Workshop
Washington, DC (metro)
1-2 April 2008; submissions due 15 February 2008

See http://www.webont.org/owled/2008dc/ for details.

The fourth workshop in the The OWL: Experiences and Direction (OWLED) workshop series will again bring users, implementors and researchers together in order to measure the current state of need against the state of the art and to set an agenda for language evolutions that satisfy users. This OWLED workshop will last two days and will be held in the Washington, D.C., area, in the first week of April 2008. The workshop will concentrate on issues related to the development and W3C standardization of OWL 1.1, but other issues related to OWL are also of interest, particularly those related to the task forces set up at OWLED 2007.

As an "interim" workshop, the workshop will be more open and unconstrained than recent OWLED workshops. The workshop will have two very different kinds of activities. There will be formal presentation of submissions to the workshop. There will also be time devoted to self-organizing groups discussing topics related to submissions to the workshop and possibly other topics related to OWL.

Making this self-organization work will require effort on the part of the attendees. Workshop attendees should read submissions accepted at the workshop before the workshop starts so that they can contribute to the discussions at the workshop. Attendees should also prepare single "slides" that can be presented during these discussions.

Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences Workshop

David Kennedy — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 3:10:51 GMT

Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences Workshop

held in conjunction with

The 17th International World Wide Web Conference
April 21-25, 2008
Beijing, China

http://ccnt.zju.edu.cn/hcls2008/
(http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLS/WWW2008 mirror Web site)

Biomedical researchers need to be able to ask questions that span many heterogeneous data sources in order to make well-informed decisions. For this to be achieved, data about drugs, patients, diseases, genes, proteins, and pathways must be effectively integrated. Yet the integration of disparate biomedical data continues to be a challenge to achieve.

Many organizations are now exploring the use of Semantic Web technologies in the hope of easing the effort of data integration. The benefits promised by the Semantic Web include aggregation of heterogeneous data using explicit semantics, simplified annotation and sharing of findings, the expression of rich and well-defined models for data aggregation and search, easier reuse of data in unanticipated ways, and the application of logic to infer additional insights.

W3C has established the Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences (HCLSIG) Interest Group to help organizations in their adoption of the Semantic Web. The HCLSIG is chartered to develop and support the use of Semantic Web technologies to improve collaboration, research and development, and innovation adoption in the domains of Health Care and Life Sciences. As a part of realizing this vision, we are organizing a workshop on the Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences in conjunction with WWW2008.

Audience:
The workshop encourages participation from industry and academia with an emphasis on the practical aspects of applying Semantic Web technologies to the challenges of Health Care and the Life Sciences. We encourage participation from Pharmaceutical and Biotech Companies, Health Care Organizations, Universities and Research Institutes, IT Vendors, and Government Agencies.

Topics of Interest:
- Semantic integration
- Knowledge representation and reasoning
- Semantic Web applications
- Semantic Web Services
- Querying RDF/OWL
- Query mediation and translation
- Semantic mashups

Submissions:
Authors are invited to submit papers in any of the areas listed above at: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=hcls2008

Papers should follow the general format of refereed papers for WWW2008 as described at: http://www2008.org/submissions/index.html

Important Dates:
Paper submission: January 25,2008
Notification of acceptance: February 22, 2008
Final version of accepted papers for inclusion on conference CD: February 29, 2008
Final version of accepted papers March 21, 2008
Date of workshop: April 22, 2008

Program Committee:
Dean Allemang, TopQuadrant
Christopher Baker, A-STAR
Olivier Bodenreider, National Library of Medicine, NIH
Keith Boyce, ImmuneTolerance
Cory Brouwer, Pfizer
Bill Bug, UCSD
Helen Chen, AGFA
William Cheung, Hong Kong Baptist University
Tim Clark, Harvard University
Sudeshna Das, Harvard University
Don Doherty, Brainstage
Lee Feigenbaum, Cambridge Semantics
Andrew Gibson, University of Manchester
Carole Goble, University of Manchester
Yufeng Guo, China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine
Amarnath Gupta, SDSC
Peter Haase, University of Karlsruhe
Volker Haarslev, Concordia University
William Hayes, BiogenIdec
Ivan Herman, W3C
Yusheng He, Peking University
Vipul Kashyap, Partners Healthcare
Marijke Keet, Free University of Bolen-Bolzano
Phil Lord, Newcastle University
M. Scott Marshall, University of Amsterdam
Robin McEntire, GlaxoSmithKline
Parsa Mirhaji, University of Texas
Mark Musen, Stanford University
Fabian Neuhaus, NIST
Eric Neumann, Clinical Semantics
Chimezie Ogbuji, Cleveland Clinic Foundation
Elgar Pichler, AstraZeneca
Matthew Pocock, Newcastle University
Daniel Rubin, Stanford University
Matthias Samwald, University of Vienna
Susanna Sansone, European Bioinformatics Institute
Michael Schroeder, Dresden University
Nigam Shah, Stanford University
Amit Sheth, Wright State University
Robert Stevens, University of Manchester
Rudi Studer, Karlsruhe University
Adam West, Eli Lilly
Katy Wostencroft, University of Manchester
Xuezhong Zhou, Nornern Jiaotong University

Organizing Committee:
Huajun Chen, Zhejiang University
Kei Cheung, Yale University
Michel Dumontier, Carleton University
Eric Prud'hommeaux, W3C
Alan Ruttenberg, Science Commons
Susie Stephens, Eli Lilly
Yimin Wang, University of Karlsruhe

NITRC Project Keywords

David Kennedy — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 9:17:25 GMT

'Public' discussion of the keywords to use for classifying NITRC projects is occuring on the Ontology Project Wiki page. Come visit to provide your feedback!