ICBO 2016 - 7th International Conference on Biological Ontology (ICBO 2016)

7th International Conference on Biological Ontology (ICBO2016) and the BioCreative 2016, to be held on August 1 - 4, 2016 at Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA.
The biology, bioinformatics and medical area have seen a deluge of data in recent times from digital record keeping, samples, methods, observations, imaging, sensors and genome-enabled genotyping, phylogenomics, phenotyping and Omics studies. More recently the improved understanding of the microbiome, its associations with environment and other organisms has contributed greatly to this growth. While the generation of Big Data has been successful in driving the knowledge, the metadata annotation (data describing the BIG data) is especially challenging in the life sciences areas. For example, in a downstream work, biologists and experts are mining the BIG data either for novel discoveries or confirming existing variations. However, much of the discovery component and inferences depend on the quality of the reference and sample annotations (metadata descriptions) such as those for assays, genotypes, molecular functions, phenotypes, pathotypes, environments, and treatments. Ontologies, a refined set of well-defined and structured controlled vocabularies, provide consistency and quality in metadata annotation. Therefore, an integrated use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and data mining methods are being used increasingly for information extraction into a more structured form, a process wherein ontologies provide the knowledge domain and the vocabulary to extract the information meaningfully.
Joint meeting of the 7th International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO) and the BioCreative 2016 aims to foster discussion, exchange, and innovation in research and development in the areas of Biomedical Ontology (including plants, agriculture, environment and biomes). Researchers and professionals from all fields of biology, medicine, ecology, computer science, mathematics, text-mining, BIG-data analytics and related fields are invited to share their knowledge and experience. The theme of joint meeting is Food, Nutrition, Health and Environment for the 9 billion. We will be actively looking for the applied aspects of ontologies and demonstration of innovative ontology-driven solutions for all areas of healthcare and life sciences including the plant biology, agriculture, ecology, and the atmospheric and ocean sciences.