Lord Phillip, Stevens Robert
Comp Funct Genomics. 2004;5(6-7):498-500. doi: 10.1002/cfg.433.
The Annual Bio-Ontologies Meeting has now reached its seventh consecutive year, running as a special interest group (SIG) of the much larger ISMB conference. This year's meeting in Glasgow had approximately 100 attendees. Since the advent of the Gene Ontology, which coincided with the first Bio-Ontologies Meeting, we have seen a year-on-year strengthening of the field; bio-ontologies has moved from being dominated by computer science to be led by biological applications; discussion is less about 'what is an ontology?' and more about 'how to build an ontology which is fit for purpose?'. This strengthening of the field can be seen elsewhere. Both the main ISMB conference and this year's Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB) have seen a large number of submissions to their ontologies track. For the first time a selection of the papers from the SIG is being published in this issue of Comparative and Functional Genomics. We hope that this will complement the publications of the larger conferences, bringing to a wider audience the cutting edge research that characterizes the Bio-Ontologies SIG.
年度生物本体论会议如今已连续举办至第七届，它作为规模大得多的智能分子生物学会议（ISMB）的一个特别兴趣小组（SIG）举行。今年在格拉斯哥召开的会议约有100名与会者。自基因本体论问世（这与首届生物本体论会议同时发生）以来，我们见证了该领域逐年的发展壮大；生物本体论已从由计算机科学主导转变为由生物学应用引领；讨论内容已从“什么是本体论？”更多地转向“如何构建适用于特定目的的本体论？”。该领域的这种发展壮大在其他方面也可见一斑。无论是ISMB主会议还是今年的太平洋生物计算研讨会（PSB），其本体论专题的投稿数量都很多。首次从该特别兴趣小组挑选出的一批论文在本期《比较与功能基因组学》上发表。我们希望这将补充大型会议的出版物，将代表生物本体论特别兴趣小组的前沿研究带给更广泛的受众。
