Press Release - [ 18.05.2009 ]
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| A Cure for Modern Biology |
The 3rd International Biocuration Conference in Berlin, Germany – Curated Data as Information for Scientists and Basis for Computational Analysis – Introducing the new International Society for Biocuration (ISB)
Could you imagine a library without librarian? That´s the situation biologists find themselves in during their daily worklife. When they do research for new experiments or simulations, they are confronted with a mass of scientific literature and very large data sets stemming from experiments. Without biocuration, searching for relevant data would be very difficult. Biocuration involves the translation of information relevant to biology into an organized form, typically as a database. Biocurators integrate data, represent them accurately, and make them easily accessible, both as a source of information for working scientists, and as a basis for computational analysis. So biocurators provide essential resources to the biological community – they are like librarians for the huge library of life.
At the Science & Conference Center in Berlin-Dahlem
At the 3rd International Biocuration Conference in Berlin, over 200 curators and developers of biological databases discussed their work, promoted their collaboration, and fostered a sense of community in this active and growing area of research.
“Data curation has been critical in the development of biology from Darwin and Linnaeus”, said Professor Janet Thornton (UK), Director of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), in her plenary talk at the Seminaris Conference Center in Berlin, Germany. The careful collection and organization of data, she pointed out, has been the spring from which new hypotheses and understanding have emerged.
Other plenary speakers were: Dr. Jim Ostell (U.S.), Chief of the Information Engineering Branch at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), who discussed the problem of finding the right balance between objective measures of quality and personal judgment, between computational measures and manual curation, between published results in journals and active curation of databases.
Professor Philip Bourne (U.S.), University of California San Diego gave an outlook of the future of open-access journals and interactive publications.
Two participants discussing a poster
Among the topics discussed were standards, controlled vocabularies, and ontologies, as well as the curation of data in functional genomics. “All in all, there were 30 talks in five sessions, two workshops and two tutorials at the conference”, said conference organizer Renate Kania from EML Research, Heidelberg. “The participants came from 21 different countries all over the world and gave an overview of ongoing projects in annotation and biocuration. For the first time the Biocuration Conference series were held in Europe” Kania said. “We have the impression that it generated a lot of attention for the significance of biocuration, much more so than in the previous years.”
 Renate Kania (EML Research)
An important event of the conference was the introduction of the newly formed International Society for Biocuration (ISB). The ISB is a non-profit organization for biocurators, developers and researchers with an interest in biocuration. It promotes the field of biocuration and provides a forum for information exchange through meetings and workshops. Besides other mission statements, the ISB will focus on two activities that were emphasized by many participants of the Berlin conference: Lobbying for increased and stable funding for resources that are essential to research, and building a relationship with publishers in order to establish a link between researchers and databases through the journal publishers. Right now, the ISB has about 120 members. Members of the temporary executive committee are Lydie Bougueleret (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics), Pascale Gaudet /Northwestern University, U.S.), and Lorna Richardson (MRC Human genetics Unit, UK).
 The plenary session
The conference talks and posters including the abstracts are available on Nature Precedings. A wrap-up of the conference and a selected number of the submitted peer reviewed articles will be published in DATABASE.
Scientific contact:
Renate Kania
renate.kania@eml-research.de
www.eml-research.de
Press contact:
Dr. Peter Saueressig
peter.saueressig@eml-research.de
www.eml-research.de
The EML Research gGmbH (www.eml-research.de) is a non-profit institute conducting research in Information Technology and its applications. A strong focus is set on bioinformatics. Research is carried out in close collaboration with universities and other research institutes. EML Research projects are supported by the Klaus Tschira Foundation (KTS) (www.kts.villa-bosch.de), as well as by the European Union, the German Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF) and by the German Research Foundation (DFG). EML Research is a partner in the first German Center for Modeling and Simulation in the Biosciences (BIOMS, www.bioms.de). KTS and EML Research are housed in the Villa Bosch in Heidelberg, the former residence of Nobel Prize laureate Carl Bosch (1874 – 1940). |
Dr. Peter Saueressig
EML Research gGmbH
Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg 33
69118 Heidelberg
Phone: +49 (0)6221 - 533 - 245
Fax: +49 (0)6221 - 533 - 198
Email: peter.saueressig@eml-r.villa-bosch.de
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