Infectious Disease Ontology Workshop and Meeting, 2007 - IDO 2007

IDO 2007 was a two-day training workshop followed by a one-day meeting held September 19 - 21, 2007 at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory with generous support from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.  The goal for IDO 2007 was to lay the foundation for a distributed, community-based approach to developing the ontology coverage needed for the infectious disease domain.  The workshop was highly successful and had four primary outcomes that directly support attainment of this goal:

1. 1.Training of a core set of infectious disease researchers in ontology-development methods, facilitating their participation in ontology development;
   

2. 2.Development of a core Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) which will serve as a consensus-based, controlled vocabulary  resource for annotation of data representing all entities relevant to infectious diseases generally;
   

3. 3.Establishment of a method for creating a set of ontologies that can be developed in a distributed fashion yet together cover the entire infectious disease domain (the set consists of the above-described core IDO ontology plus sub-domain-specific extensions of the core, such as IDO-tuberculosis, IDO-malaria);
   

4. 4.Formation of an Infectious Disease Ontology Consortium whose members have agreed to contribute towards continued development of the core IDO and to develop seven different sub-domain-specific ontologies.
   

To view the workshop schedule and meeting agenda, visit the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory websites: Workshop website, Meeting website.

The meeting report can be downloaded here.

Infectious Disease Ontology Workshop, 2008 - IDO 2008

IDO 2008 will be held September 16 - 17, 2008 at the University at Buffalo.  The goals of this workshop are to:

1. 1.Critically evaluate the ontology development test cases initiated at IDO 2007 (see below) to both improve the ontologies themselves and the methodology used for their development,
   

2. 2.Identify key application test cases, such as ontology-based natural language processing, to be developed over the coming year,
   

3. 3.Significantly expand representation in the Infectious Disease Ontology Consortium for sub-domains within the infectious disease domain still lacking ontology development effort,
   

4. 4.Involve representatives from key information sources and institutions that could be important contributors and users of the IDO set of ontologies,
   

5. 5.Provide training for new Consortium members.
   

The anticipated outcomes of IDO 2008 are a fully tested development methodology that can be adopted on a broad scale by experts in a wide variety of infectious disease sub-domains and increased participation in the Consortium of individuals with the necessary training and expertise.

Registration:  Attendance at this meeting is by invitation only.  If you are interested in attending, please email Lindsay Cowell or Barry Smith.

Venue:  The meeting venue is:

Ramada Hotel and Conference Center

2402 North Forest Road

Amherst, New York  14068

Travel and Lodging Arrangements:  All travel and lodging arrangements will be made by Sandra Smith.

Meeting Wiki:  More detailed information, including a schedule, can be found on the IDO 2008 wiki.