ICBO 2012: 3rd International Conference on Biomedical Ontology

Ontologies are increasingly used in biology and medicine, and their use in annotation of both clinical and experimental data is now common technique in integrative translational research. They are being developed for the description of biological and biomedical phenomena. To be maximally effective, such ontologies must work well together. As ontologies become more commonly used, the problems involved in achieving coordination in ontology development become ever more urgent. This conference addresses these problems. It brings together representatives of all major communities involved in the development and application of ontologies in biomedicical research, health care, and related areas. In addition to papers, the conference will feature workshops and tutorials, as well as software demonstrations and a doctoral symposium.

ICBO 2012 is collocated with FOIS 2012, the seventh Conference on Formal Ontologies in Information Systems. This conference series focuses on the systematization and elaboration of ontologies and associated reasoning techniques. The discipline of formal ontology is now applied to such diverse domains as artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, bioinformatics, GIS, knowledge engineering, information retrieval, and the Semantic Web. FOIS is intended to gather researchers with an interest in formal ontology, where both theoretical issues and concrete applications can be explored in an interdisciplinary spirit.

Chairs: Ronald Cornet, Robert Stevens, Melanie Courtot, Ludger Jansen, Trish Whetzel, Janna Hastings