The COmputational Modeling in BIology NEtwork (COMBINE) is an initiative to coordinate the development of the various community standards and formats for computational models, in Systems Biology and related fields. The COMBINE Workshop goals are to allow researchers in various pathway standard efforts (SBGN, SBML, BioPAX, CellML, SED-ML, etc.) to gather and exchange ideas, report progress, discuss interoperability between standards, and plan for future synergistic development. In past versions of the workshop, integration and inter-exchange of data between different standards have been discussed and implemented in different software tools and pathway/model databases. As the only graphical standard in the initiative, SBGN (Systems Biology Graphical Notation) defines a standard for visual representation of biological pathways and models. SBGN must be interoperable with the other standards to be effective.
The goal of COMBINE workshop is to bring scientists and developers in the standardizing efforts together for collaborative and synergistic development of pathway and model standards. With an ever growing amount of experimental data, better high-throughput technologies, and increasingly complex data models, computer and software have revolutionized the way bioscience research is conducted. Standards that work together cohesively will transform the way biological knowledge is communicated, not only among the research community, but also between humans and computers. The workshop talks and presentations will be freely available on the internet to the public and researchers.
