OBO Foundry/Industry Workshop

9 June 2009

Dear Associates,

We would like to invite you to the OBO Foundry and Industry Workshop.The workshop venue is the IT Training Room, European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK.

Participants: OBO Foundry Coordinators and EBI Industry Programme members, EBI staff (Graham Cameron, Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann, Bernard De Bono) and invited and key opinion leaders.

Sponsors: EBI Industry Programme, BBSRC Standards and Ontology grant

Motivation: the pharmaceutical, healthcare, agrochemical and nutrition industries are critically dependent on information for all elements of their activities. This information may come from a wide variety of sources and must be integrated in order to support decision making at different points during the research and development process.
At a minimal, such integration is dependent upon information being represented in terms of standard vocabularies and knowledge management tools for combining this information. This, in turn, is depended upon persistent and sustainable reference and application ontologies on the one hand and the adoption of these standard ontologies and other resources by both the academic community and the commercial service provider community including publishers and custom solutions providers, on the other hand.
Overall, this represents a significant challenge to each of (a) the providers of content, (b) the distributors of content (c) the consumers of content and (d) the individuals and organisations responsible for the management and integration of controlled vocabularies, ontologies and associated standards.

Intended outcomes: The intended outcomes of this one day workshop are (i) to document model of engagements for how industry members and the OBO Foundry can provide mutual leverage to support semantic integration standards and activities; (ii) to document key challenges and opportunities; (iii) to develop a position statement for public and commercial information providers.