The slides, minutes and recording of this meeting can be found here.
You are invited to a virtual Annual General Meeting of the International Society for Biocuration on Wednesday, 18 October. The meeting will include presentations by our two biocurator career award winners, Nico Matentzoglu and Charlie Hoyt.
Time: 5 pm CET / 4 pm BST / 8 am PT / 11 pm ET
Please fill out this form to register to attend and receive the zoom meeting link. NOTE this meeting will be recorded, by attending the meeting you are agreeing to be recorded. The recording will be available on the ISB website after the meeting.
Program (CET times)
5.00pm Ruth Lovering (ISB EC Chair): ISB Annual General Meeting
5:30pm Open for questions and suggestions from attendees
5:45pm Nico Matentzoglu, Excellence in Biocuration, Advanced Career Award
Presentation title: Closing the gap between effective Biocuration and meaningful ontology evolution
6:10pm Charlie Hoyt, Excellence in Biocuration, Early Career Award
Presentation title: Democratizing Biocuration, or, How I Learned to Love the Drive-by Curation
Presentation Abstracts
Nico Matentzoglu, Excellence in Biocuration, Advanced Career Award
Presentation title: Closing the gap between effective Biocuration and meaningful ontology evolution
Effective Biocuration is dependent on controlled
vocabularies such as biomedical ontologies. From the perspective of
biocurators, it is of central importance to get new terms integrated into the
ontology as soon as they are needed. From the perspective of the users who want
to exploit the ontology for analysing their data, however, it is key that the
integrated term is carefully curated into the ontological structure, which is
difficult and time-consuming. This provides a dilemma for ontology developers
who, on the one side, are expected to respond quickly to curation requests, but
on the other side are tasked to provide a reliable resource for the community.
In this talk, I will describe a strategy based on change languages, design
patterns and templates that could be used to “outsource” some of the ontology
curation to biocurators, thereby creating a drastically reduced effort and
subsequently much tighter turnaround time for new (and changed) term requests.
I will discuss the importance of such community contributions to open ontology
projects and hope to convince the biocuration community to engage more closely
with the ontology curation process.
Charlie Hoyt, Excellence in Biocuration, Early Career Award
Presentation title: Democratizing Biocuration, or, How I Learned to Love the Drive-by Curation
Abstract: The increasing reliance of artificial intelligence applications in biomedicine on reliable structured data, metadata, and knowledge accentuates the need for effective, sustainable biocuration. While there has been a historical disconnect between such consumers and biocurators, the looming paradigm shift towards the open code, open data, and open infrastructure (O3) principles presents an opportunity to engage and empower consumers to contribute to the maintenance and ongoing development of the resources they use. In this talk, I will reflect on how biocuration became an important facet of my job as a systems and networks biologist interested in translational research as I became more aware of the importance of data quality and provenance. Notably, I will highlight the concept of the drive-by curation and how it fits into a more community-oriented future vision for biocuration.