Bio-Ontologies and ICBO

I’m winding by way back from a busy month with both Bio-Ontologies and ICBO, but in general I think the experience has been really positive, even if interspersing holiday and work travel has rather exhausted me. But both were in Europe and Bio-Ontologies was right next door, so I did not want to waste the opportunity.

I have a long history with Bio-Ontologies, having been a chair for many years and a informal helper before that. We steered it from an informal meeting, to having a proper programme committee, proceedings and much of the structure that it has now. I bumped into Steven Leard at the meeting, and was rather shocked to realise that the first meeting I helped out at was 14 years ago.

Strangely, though, since my last time as a chair, five or six years ago, I’ve never been once. For a few years, of course, this was quite deliberate; I was so fed up with travelling at that time of year, that I really enjoyed the rest. But since then, it has been happenstance, rather than a deliberate decision. So, it felt like a bit of a home-coming, and even if I have seen many of the people at different conferences on different occasions. Mark Musen gave a interesting keynote: I was, at the time, rather unconvinced by this hypothesis that we don’t spend enough time arguing (I mean, ontologists, really?). A more nuanced reading of what he said though, is that we should assess and re-assess our practices against the evidence of our experience. I cannot help but agree with this, and it has made me think again. More on that later, perhaps.

It was nice to go to Dublin, also, as it was my first time. Nice city, deeply integrated with it’s river. We had some nice feed, in some good resturants and cafes, and a blissful absence of Irish theme pubs. The conference venue was good also, even if it does look like a vacuum cleaner from outside.

ICBO was a different kettle of fish, though. At four days (many of the delegates go for the whole thing) it’s long, and I felt rather stretched by the end (I’m on the plane home now, after a very early start, which might be colouring my vision). This does give plenty of time for slightly longer and more detailed presentations; the workshops were small, intense and full of discussion. Likewise, the poster and demo sessions. I rather blitzed the conference with Tawny-OWL (n.d.a) and Lentic (n.d.b) In total, I gave 1 tutorial; 1 paper; 1 demo; 1 flash update on the demo and 1 feedback session on the tutorial. People seemed genuinely sympathetic and a little sad when my cute Tawny-OWL logo went 404 during the flash update. For those who missed it, the logo is online, as is the logo for lentic which lacks in cuteness, but is rather more dramatic.

I got some good feedback, was surprised to win the best demo session (I mean, it was entirely text running in Emacs, and very laggy, running on my 5 year-old netbook). The second place was James Overton’s Robot. I am told between the two of us we got a very large percentage of the vote. I think this is an interesting result, because it strongly suggests to me that, for ICBO attendees there is disatisfaction over current tooling. Ontologies are being more programmatically developed and I cannot help but feel that this is the future.

I thought I had never been to Lisbon before, but on getting there I realised I had been, about 20 years ago; the story of is long, and not that interesting so I will skip describing it here. This time I had a better look and I will not forget again. Lisbon is very nice city indeed; while it’s architectural elegance may not be quite up there with Rome (or even Milan), it’s certainly not far behind, but as a city built into and with its geography it is stunning.

In summary, an interesting month from an ontology perspective and one that I enjoyed very much. While I might have wanted for something a little less hectic (especially, as I interspersed my holidays (n.d.c) it has left me with the sense that ontologies are both a productive part of the bioinformatics environment and a sense that there is more to come.