As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the description of the structure of DNA, biology is evolving from a science of organisms and molecules to a science of information. In modern biology, massive amounts of data are produced resulting, for example, from sequencing the genome of many organisms and studying gene expression under various conditions. In turn, there has been a shift from hypothesis-driven experiments to data-driven experiments.
Ontologies provide a conceptualization of a domain that can be shared among diverse groups of researchers and health care professionals and used computationally for multiple purposes. Biologic knowledge is evolving so rapidly that it is difficult for most scientists to assimilate and integrate the new information with their existing knowledge. Promoting the creation and use of ontologies for the field and linking to other ontologies in related domains holds the promise of assisting those working in biomedical disciplines and thus making more rapid scientific progress.
This session would welcome papers that discuss:
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, 2003, and present their work in the poster sessions.
All papers must be submitted to russ.altman@stanford.edu in electronic format. The file formats we accept are: Adobe Acrobat (*.pdf) and Microsoft Word documents (*.doc). Attached files should be named with the last name of the first author (e.g. 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:
Submitted papers are limited to twelve (12) pages in our publication format. Please format your paper according to instructions found at: http://www.smi.stanford.edu/projects/helix/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.