News

DILS 2005, the "2nd International Workshop on Data Integration in the Life Sciences," will be held July 20-22, 2005 at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego. The two-and-half day workshop will address issues in both research and practice in data management and integration in the life sciences. The workshop website with program and other information is at www.syncenter.org/dils2005/. Registration is now open and the early-bird registration deadline is June 30, 2005.

Rapid advances across the life sciences, from molecular biology and drug discovery to medical research and biodiversity, increasingly depend on bioinformatics tools to manage and analyze vast amounts of highly diverse data. The volume of data is increasing at an unprecedented pace, fueled by worldwide research that is producing publicly available data as well as new high-throughput technologies such as microarrays.

Along with unparalleled opportunities for research, this wealth of data presents new challenges. Data mining and analysis require comprehensive integration of heterogeneous data collections that are often distributed across different data sources on the Web, and are often structured only to a limited degree. Despite new interoperability technologies such as XML and Web services, data integration still remains a highly challenging task that in practice is largely carried out manually, due both to the high degree of semantic heterogeneity and the varying quality of data, as well as specific requirements that depend on each application.

DILS 2005 will provide a forum for presenting novel research results and assessing the state of the art in the rapidly-changing field of data integration in the life sciences. Attendees will include researchers as well as industrial practitioners, and the workshop will combine both research papers and application/experience papers. The papers will be published by Springer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.

The keynote talks will be "Curated Databases" by Peter Buneman of the School of Informatics and Digital Curation Centre, University of Edinburgh, and "Challenges in Biological Data Integration in the Post-Genome Sequence Era" by Shankar Subramaniam of the Department of Bioengineering and SDSC at UCSD.

The program will have invited presentations on "Challenges in Providing Long-Lived Integrated Information Resources for Biologists" by Susan Baxter of the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR), and "Eco-Informatics for Decision Makers: Advancing a Research Agenda" by Judy Cushing of Evergreen College and Tyrone Wilson of the USGS. In addition, there will be a poster session and sections on User Applications, Ontologies, and four sections on Data Integration, as well as project updates on the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) and the Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK).

Sponsors include the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and UCSD, Microsoft Research, the American Medical Informatics Association, the Genome Center at UC Davis, the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at UMIACS, and SDSC's Synthesis Center and Science R&D Division.