Abstract
The Annual Bio-Ontologies meeting (http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/˜stevens/meeting03/) has now been running for 6 consecutive years, as a special interest group (SIG) of the much larger ISMB conference. It met in Brisbane, Australia, this summer, the first time it was held outside North America or Europe. The bio-ontologies meeting is 1 day long and normally has around 100 attendees. This year there were many fewer, no doubt a result of the distance, global politics and SARS. The meeting consisted of a series of 30 min talks with no formal peer review or publication. Talks ranged in style from fairly formal and complete pieces of work, through works in progress, to the very informal and discursive. Each year's meeting has a theme and this year it was ‘ontologies, and text processing’. There is a tendency for those submitting talks to ignore the theme completely, but this year's theme obviously struck a chord, as half the programme was about ontologies and text analysis (http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/˜stevensr/meeting03/programme.html). Despite the smaller size of the meeting, the programme was particularly strong this year, meaning that the tension between allowing time for the many excellent talks, discussion and questions from the floor was particular keenly felt. A happy problem to have!
Highlights
IntroductionBiologists long ago passed the point at which more information was produced than one person could read and understand
The Annual Bio-Ontologies meeting has been running for 6 consecutive years, as a special interest group (SIG) of the much larger ISMB conference. It met in Brisbane, Australia, this summer, the first time it was held outside North America or Europe
Biologists long ago passed the point at which more information was produced than one person could read and understand
Summary
Biologists long ago passed the point at which more information was produced than one person could read and understand. With the advent of genome data, the need to organize and search has become extreme. A common understanding of biological knowledge is essential for such comparisons. The aim is not to replace the role of the biologist in understanding, describing and explaining biological functions, but to enable them to store, organize and use the knowledge that they, as a community, produce. This in turn allows the more efficient retrieval and searching of biological data. The hope is that a commitment to a common understanding by both humans and computers should enable the scientific process
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