This application is for support of the """"""""Standards and Ontologies for Functional Genomics Conference"""""""", to be held on October 23-26, 2004 at The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The overall objective of this conference is to bring together investigators who have a common interest in the development and use of standards and ontologies for functional genomics. This conference provides a unique opportunity for established investigators and students to interact and exchange ideas regarding shared tools and procedures for the functional annotation of genomes and phenotypes. Such conferences are particularly relevant in light of the continued release of new genome sequences, the shared use of high-throughput experimental techniques, the impact of molecular biology on biomedicine, and the importance of comparative genomics in the investigation of human biology and disease. It is particularly important in these times that scientific communication between researchers and computational systems keeps pace with discovery. It is, therefore, the primary aim of these conferences to promote and maintain shared annotation systems in the genomics and bioinformatics communities, and to provide standards and ontologies to facilitate the exchange of information by computers and computation analysis applications. Toward this end, students and established investigators from different areas of computer science, experimental biology, and bioinformatics will have an opportunity to share new ideas, demonstrate new tools and applications, and identify potential collaborations. The conference will convene over a period of 4 days, and will consist of two to three sessions per day for three days with a banquet on the evening of the 25. Sessions will consist of 3-4 invited lectures of approximately 25 minutes in length, with 5 minutes allotted at the end of each presentation for questions from the audience. Additional short talks will be selected from submitted abstracts. The format will include ontologies workshops on various approaches to constructing and maintaining ontologies, an informatics resource demonstration session, and a poster session dedicated to developments in using ontologies for functional genome annotations, data mining, and knowledge discovery applications. Speaker abstracts will be assembled into a booklet and distributed to the conference participants. These abstracts will also be made available on the web at www.jax.org/courses as permissions allow. ? ?
