The 5th International Conference on Biomedical Ontology kicks off tomorrow

I'm here in Houston with my co-organizer, Sivaram Arabandi, sitting outside on a beautiful day as we put the finishing touch on what promises to be an outstanding program for the 5th International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO14).

ICBO14 kicks off Monday, Oct 6th with workshops and tutorials.  We have four--yes four--workshops that deal with the ontology of drugs and drug interactions.  There are also workshops on the ontology of biobanking, the OBO Foundry, and definitions in ontologies.  We also have tutorials on the OBO Foundry and mapping relational databases to the Resource Description Framework.

Our keynote speakers are highly distinguished.  Dr. Warren Kibbe--currently the the director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI)--will give a dinner keynote on October 8th entitled Supporting Precision Oncology using Ontologies.

Also giving a keynote address is John Wilbanks--Chief Commons Officer of Sage Bionetworks, who will talk about Ontologies and Open Collaboration.  John has also worked at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the World Wide Web Consortium, the US House of Representatives, and Creative Commons. John is a past affiliate of MIT’s Project on Mathematics and Computation and also started a bioinformatics company called Incellico, which is now part of Selventa.

We have a great scientific program with full-length and early-career papers, posters, software demonstrations, invited updates, and panels.  We are especially looking forward to a panel on ontology and genomics with Christian Stoeckert, Bjorn Peters, and Jim Zheng of the Center for Computational Biomedicine at the School of Biomedical Informatics here in Houston.

If you are not already registered or planning to come, you're going to miss out on a fantastic program!