*** See the program, including joining instructions, for the virtual event on September 17th ***
*** Information about associated ICBO workshops can be found here. ***
*** Registration for the virtual ICBO 2020 is now open: https://summerofknowledge.inf.unibz.it/registration/ ***
Due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, ICBO 2020 will take place in slimmed-down form virtually, while the face-to-face component will be *postponed* to September 2021. Proceedings will still be published in 2020 as usual.
The International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO) is a premier annual conference series that brings together researchers, students and professionals involved in the development and application of ontologies in all areas of biology, medicine, diseases, human health, genome biology, environment, biomes, nutrition, food, plants, agriculture and others.
This year, ICBO will be run jointly with Ontologies and Data for the Life Sciences (ODLS), an annual workshop series that focuses on data management and data processing in the life sciences and in health care, covering the overall spectrum of biomedical information management, from experimental data acquisition and preprocessing across analysis, structuring and interpretation of data, up to developing structured representations of knowledge, in particular in the form of ontologies, with their various applications.
The virtual event of ICBO 2020 will be held as a part of the Bolzano Summer of Knowledge 2020, together with EKAW 2020.
Theme
The theme for ICBO|ODLS 2020 is Ontology across Boundaries. This includes the topics of:
- Ontologies at the practical interfaces between different yet interrelated disciplines and communities of practice (e.g. biology–chemistry, immunology–epidemiology etc.)
- Ontologies overcoming boundaries between basic research and translation
- Ontologies and the socioeconomic boundaries that can lead to differences in health outcomes across different population groups
- Ontology as a tool for open science to reduce segregation of research results and improve access to the full body of knowledge across scientific disciplines, especially as applied to urgent topics such as the climate crisis
- Ontologies in practice across national boundaries, e.g. medical ontologies needing to serve international contexts
- Ontology in translation: ontologies supporting knowledge, data and applications in multiple languages
- Overcoming the practical boundaries of ontologies in integrated applications including data annotation, data integration, data science, machine learning and other artificial intelligence technologies
Organisation
ICBO|ODLS 2020 is co-chaired by Frank Loebe and Janna Hastings. The full organising committee is detailed here.
The Bolzano Summer of Knowledge 2020 is being arranged locally by Oliver Kutz and the Research Centre on Knowledge and Data (KRDB), Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.
Keynote Speakers
We are delighted to announce that our keynote speakers for ICBO 2020 will be:
Professor Susan Michie, head of the Centre for Behaviour Change, University College London.
(Postponed to 2021) Dr Chris Mungall, Department Head, Molecular Ecosystems Biology, Berkeley Lab.
This keynote has been postponed to ICBO 2021