BOSC 2009

BOSC 2009 will be held for 2 days in conjunction with the 17th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2009) in Stockholm, Sweden (which itself will be held jointly with the 7th European Conference on Computational Biology, ECCB 2009). The dates of BOSC 2009 are June 27 - 28; the main ISMB/ECCB Conference runs June 29 - July 2, 2009.

Please see past BOSC conferences for the previous 9 conferences.

Overview

The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) is sponsored by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF), a non-profit group dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development within the biological research community.

Many open source bioinformatics packages are widely used by the research community across many application areas and form a cornerstone in enabling research in the genomic and post-genomic era. Open source bioinformatics software has facilitated rapid innovation, dissemination, and wide adoption of new computational methods, reusable software components, and standards. One of the hallmarks of BOSC is the coming together of the open source developer community in one location to meet face-to-face. This creates synergy where participants can work together to create use cases, prototype working code, or run bootcamps for developers from other projects as short, informal, and hands-on tutorials in new software packages and emerging technologies. In short, BOSC is not just a conference for presentations of completed work, but is a dynamic meeting where collaborative work gets done and attendees can learn about new or on-going developments that they can directly apply to their own work.

Important Dates

Keynote Speakers

The BOSC 2009 Organizing committee is pleased to announce our two Keynote Speakers:

Alan Ruttenberg

Alan Ruttenberg is a Principal Scientist at Science Commons. He works with Semantic Web technologies in computational biology, with an emphasis on the creation and application of structured biological knowledge to interpret experimental results. He is currently involved in a number of open biomedical ontology efforts, including: the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI), the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) that will form the upper level ontology for the OBO foundry, the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO), the Program on Ontologies of Neural Structures (PONS), the Information Artifact Ontology (IAO), and BioPAX-OBO for representing molecular and cellular pathways. These interests and efforts come together in my project at Science Commons - the Neurocommons, a large scale Semantic Web knowledge base of biological information aimed at supporting, initially, the neurosciences. He is also an active participant in W3C Semantic Web activities. In 2006 and 2007 he was a member of the Health Care Life Sciences Interest Group, and early work on the Neurocommons became the core of the prototype life sciences knowledge base that the group has documented. He is a chair of the OWL Working Group specifying OWL 2, and a coordinating editor of the OBO Foundry. His graduate work was at the MIT Media Lab in the Music and Cognition Group, and he has an undergraduate degree in Physics and Mathematics from Brandeis University.

His talk at BOSC will be entitled “Can we reduce the burden of data integration? Challenge and opportunity in building the web of data”.

Robert S. Hanmer

Robert S. Hanmer is a Consulting Member of Technical Staff in the Technical Component Management area in Alcatel-Lucent’s Operations area. He is based in Naperville, Illinois, USA. Current responsibilities include developing software-sourcing strategies for middleware and open source software. Previous positions within Lucent and Bell Laboratories have included development, architecture and evaluation of highly reliable systems focusing especially on the areas of reliability and performance. He is active in the software patterns community, including serving as program chair at several pattern conferences. He has authored or co-authored 14 journal articles, several book chapters and the book Patterns for Fault Tolerant Software. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, a Senior Member of the ACM and current President of The Hillside Group, the organization that sponsors the PLoP conference. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

His talk at BOSC will be entitled “Software Patterns for Reusable Design”.

Schedule

Information for Speakers

Audio/Visual

Post-conference Slide Availability

Call for Lightning Talks/Demos/Birds of a Feather Sessions

Lightning Talks and Software Demonstrations

The program committee is currently seeking speakers for the lightning talks. Lightning talks are quick - only five minutes long - and a great opportunity for you to give people a quick summary of your open source project, code, idea, or vision of the future. Or, if you are involved in the development of novel Open Source Software, you could use the time to give a quick demonstration of your work.

If you are interested in giving a Lightning Talk or Software Demonstration at BOSC 2009, please e-mail us at bosc@open-bio.org:

We will accept entries on-line until BOSC starts, but space for demos and lightning talks is limited.

Birds of a Feather Sessions

One of the more popular activities at BOSC are the Birds-of-a-Feather sub-meetings that people organize at the end of each days session. These are free-form meetings organized by the attendees themselves. Traditionally, some BOF’s have been formed to allow developers and users of individual OBF software to meet each other face-to-face to discuss the project, but other meetings have been formed to discuss completely new ideas. These meetings offer a unique opportunity for individuals to explore more about the activities of the various Open Source Projects, and, in some cases, even take an active role influencing the future of Open Source Software development. If you would like to create a BOF, just sign up for a wiki account, login, and edit the BOSC 2009 Birds of a Feather page.

Sessions

This year’s conference will mark the 10th anniversary of BOSC. To celebrate the special occasion, the theme of this year’s conference is “Looking Back and Looking Ahead: Open Source Solutions to Grand Challenges in Bioinformatics.”

Ware asking all speakers to come prepared to lead an informal tutorial on their software during a Birds of a Feather/hackathon session. This year’s topics include:

Abstract Submission Information

The deadline for abstract submissions was Monday, April 13; abstract submissions are now closed for full talks. Abstract submissions will not be accepted via e-mail this year. All abstracts are to be submitted through our EasyChair conference site.

Abstracts must be one page in length and submitted as a PDF file only. Please observe the following formatting guidelines

Accepted talks will be 10-20 minutes, depending on the session. You will be notified of the length of your talk upon abstract acceptance.

Submissions for Lightning Talks (length ~5 minutes) will be accepted up until the day of the conference, though submission to the program following the above guidelines is strongly encouraged to facilitate better planning. The open-source license requirement (see below) applies equally to lightning talks.

Open Source License Requirement

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation, which is the sole sponsor of BOSC, is dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source Software Development within the biological research community. For this reason, if a submitted talk proposal concerns a specific software system for use by the research community, then that software must be licensed with a recognized Open Source License, and be available for download, including source code, by a tar/zip file accessed through ftp/http or through a widely used version control system like cvs/subversion/git/bazaar/Mercurial.

See the following websites for further information:

Organizing Committee

The organizing committee can be contacted by email at bosc@open-bio.org.

Chair

Co-Chair

Members

How to participate & contact