_______________________________________________________________________ This message is posted to several lists. We apologize if you receive multiple copies. Please forward it to everyone who might be interested. _______________________________________________________________________ Call for Papers and Posters Semantic Webs for Life Sciences at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing 2006 http://psb.stanford.edu/ January 3-7, 2006 Grand Wailea Resort, Wailea, Maui, Hawaii _______________________________________________________________________ Biology is evolving from a science of organisms and molecules to one that increasingly relies on processing data. These data range from raw sequences represented in a reasonably computational form, to the vast body of annotation of these data that are less amenable to computational processing. The shift from hypothesis-driven experiments to data-driven experiments relies on having computational access to all these data and the tools that manipulate those data. The Semantic Web is a vision that moves the Web from a form that is only really usable by humans, to one where the data and services are open to autonomous computational agents. This vision relies on the semantics of both the content and services on the Web being accessible to computers. Semantic markup through ontologies developed in OWl or RDF are meant to provide this semantic markup -- OWL is, after all, the web Ontology Language. As the recent biomedical ontology sessions at PSB have revealed, there is much activity within bioinformatics in the field of semantic markup of data. The discipline is well poised to build Semantic Webs for Life Sciences that will afford bioinformatics applications deeper computational access to the knowledge element of bioinformatics resources. This session on Semantic Webs for Life Sciences would therefore welcome papers that discuss: * The creation and use of Semantic Web applications * Reasoning about the biomedical domain based on Semantic Web technologies to make scientific insights * Intelligent agent technologies and associated ontologies * Use of Semantic Web technologies to bridge between heterogeneous information resources (e.g., to connect genotype to gene expression and ultimately to clinical medicine, drug discoveries, etc.) * Use of Semantic Web technologies to make biomedical applications interoperable * The use of OWL, RDF, etc. to describe and use knowledge in the biomedical arena * Advances in Semantic Web related technologies as applied to bioinformatics and biomedical problems * Other research associated with Semantic Webs for Life Sciences _______________________________________________________________________ Session co-chairs * Robert Stevens (Contact Person) University of Manchester, UK robert.stevens@manchester.ac.uk * Olivier Bodenreider National Library of Medicine olivier@nlm.nih.gov * Yves A. Lussier Columbia University, NY, USA yves.lussier@dbmi.columbia.edu _______________________________________________________________________ Submission information Papers and Posters The core of the conference consists of rigorously peer-reviewed full-length papers reporting on original work. Accepted papers will be published in a hard-bound archival proceedings, and the best of these will be presented orally to the entire conference. Researchers wishing to present their research without official publication are encouraged to submit a one page abstract by November 1, 2005 to present their work in the poster sessions. Important dates * Paper submissions due: July 18, 2005 * Notification of paper acceptance: September 6, 2005 * Final paper deadline: September 23, 2005 * Abstract deadline: November 1, 2005 * Meeting: January 3-7, 2006 Paper format All papers must be submitted to russ.altman@stanford.edu in electronic format. The file formats we accept are: postscript (*.ps), Adobe Acrobat (*.pdf) and Microsoft Word documents (*.doc). Attached files should be named with the last name of the first author (e.g. altman.ps, altman.pdf, or altman.doc). Hardcopy submissions or unprocessed TEX or LATEX files will be rejected without review. Each paper must be accompanied by a cover letter. The *cover letter must state* the following: * The email address of the corresponding author * The specific PSB session that should review the paper or abstract * The submitted paper contains original, unpublished results, and is not currently under consideration elsewhere. * All co-authors concur with the contents of the paper. Submitted papers are limited to twelve (12) pages in our publication format. Please format your paper according to instructions found at http://psb.stanford.edu/psb-online/psb-submit/. If figures can not be easily resized and placed precisely in the text, then it should be clear that with appropriate modifications, the total manuscript length would be within the page limit. Color pictures can be printed at the expense of the authors. The fee is $500 per page of color pictures, payable at the time of camera ready submission. Contact Russ Altman (russ.altman@stanford.edu) for additional information about paper submission requirements. -- Carole Goble Professor of Computer Science University of Manchester UK tel: +44 161 275 6195 http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~carole