Selected papers from the 12th annual Bio-Ontologies meeting

Biology, medicine, and biomedical computing have become critically dependent on the use of ontologies. Resources such as the Gene Ontology, the National Cancer Institute’s Thesaurus, the Foundational Model of Anatomy, SNOMED-CT, and the Ontology for Biomedical Investigation have become integral components of modern biomedical research and practice. Where once ontologies were perceived as arcane, over-complicated, and perhaps a bit over-hyped, they now serve as essential infrastructure for contemporary biology and medicine. In the past several years, the importance of ontologies in biomedicine has sky-rocketed. Ontologies are used to annotate experimental data, to aid information retrieval, to enable integration of heterogeneous data sets, to drive literature mining, and to build electronic knowledge bases. Recent research on biomedical ontologies and its application in life sciences focuses on data sharing standards, as well as semantic enrichment of existing scholarly content.

Bio-Ontologies has been a Special Interest Group (SIG) at ISMB for the last 12 years, providing a venue for sharing experiences and methods on the use of ontologies and their application to life sciences. Over the years, the Bio-Ontologies SIG has provided a forum for discussion on the latest and most innovative topics in this area. In 2009, the SIG received 27 paper submissions and 8 poster abstracts. 14 papers were selected for presentation at the meeting, out of which 7 papers have been selected for this special issue.