Author: SusanBello

Call for Proposals to host the 2026 International Biocuration Conference.

Dear Colleagues,

The Executive Committee of the International Society for Biocuration (ISB) would like to once again invite tenders to host the 19th International Biocuration Conference in Europe during the Northern Spring or Summer of 2026.

Individuals and organizations interested in applying may do so by sending a proposal to the ISB Executive Committee (intsocbio@gmail.com) on or before August 31st, 2024. 

The successful bidder will be notified by October 1st, 2024. The ISB Executive Committee will publicly announce the selected organization or individuals during the 18th International Biocuration Conference, held in Kansas City, MO, USA in April, 2025.

Format:

Proposals should be short; length should not exceed one side of an A4 or US letter size sheet, using 11 point font. The proposal should contain:

  • The name and institution of the local organizer
  • Details of the proposed venue for at least 150 participants, if the venue has less space please provide plans for hybrid attendance. Typical numbers have not exceeded 350 participants.
  • The range of dates available for the conference. Previous conferences typically have 3-4 days of main conference agenda and 1-2 days of workshops. Dates should not overlap with local holidays.
  • A brief outline of a strategic plan to attract a broad range of participants from the Biocuration community
  • As fair gender representation is positively encouraged by the ISB; we would also like to know how the applicant intends to accomplish this.

In a continued effort to bring our meeting to curators in all geographic regions, we strongly encourage ISB members in Europe and Africa to put forward proposals to bring the ISB meeting to your region once again, or for the first time!

REGIONS ROTATION: 

  • North and South America
  • Europe and Africa
  • Asia and Australasia

This Call for Applications is also available on the ISB website at https://www.biocuration.org/events-and-conferences. For more information about the ISB and our previous conferences, please visit http://www.biocuration.org.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Your colleagues at the ISB Executive Committee.

Announcement for 2023 winners of “Excellence in Biocuration Awards”

We are pleased to announce winners of “Excellence in Biocuration Award” for the year 2023 in two categories:

Charlie is in 3/4 profile playing a guitar with his mouth open singing into a mic with an orange covering. He is wearing a black t-shirt and orange slacks.

Early Career Award – Charles Tapley Hoyt, Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology Harvard Medical School, MA, USA

Charlie has been so amazingly busy in such a short amount of time. He is a Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School and the primary curator, developer, and maintainer of several community datasets and databases.These include Bioregistry, which promotes standardization of prefixes, CURIEs, and URIs when used to reference entities/concepts in the life sciences. He contributes to Biomappings, which provides mappings between named biological entities. He created Chemical Roles Graph, which curates mechanistic relations between small molecules and biological processes, pathways, and diseases in an ontological framework. He is a frequent contributor to other curated datasets, and promotes the concept of the Drive-by Curation and of progressive governance models to enable community curation and strengthen project sustainability.

Charlie actively contributes to community efforts; he is an active member of the OBO Foundry ontology community, focusing on promoting standardization of semantics, better curation and coding practices through continuous integration/continuous development and social workflows, promotes more granular attribution and explicit/transparent licensing to better enable reuse.

He contributes to standards development including the SSSOM standard, a simple standard for sharing ontology mappings that includes explicit semantics and provenance, and is a member of Biological Expression Language (BEL), a domain-specific language for representing causal, correlative, and associative relationships between biomedical entities as well as their associated contextual and provenance annotations.

He has mentored a large number of students at the Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI) and is frequently available to lend support to public projects such as PyBEL and PyKEEN.

Charlie is actively engaged in the Biocuration community and co-chaired the most recent Biocuration 2023 conference in Padova, Italy and participated in the organizing committee of the Virtual Biocuration 2022 Conference. His charisma, enthusiasm and energy are invaluable to our community. His enthusiasm and energy are rare and he deserves to be celebrated.

Advanced Career Award – Nicolas Matentzoglu, Monarch Initiative, Semanticly, Greece

The head and shoulders of Nico appear in front of a background of blue sky and green trees. Nico is wearing a dark blue shirt.

Nico is celebrated in the bio-ontology and biocuration community as a passionate promoter of open science and a champion of curators and ontology editors. He generously shares his extensive knowledge of semantic and ontology engineering, and works tirelessly to drive complex collaborations involving many different stakeholders.

Nico co-leads the OBO Academy, which brings together extensive yet highly accessible training material on ontologies and related topics through collaboratively authored online material as well as curated seminars, tutorials, and courses. This material has been used extensively by many curators to help them master everything from ontology development to writing queries to retrieve biological data.

Thanks to Nico’s vision and technical oversight, the Ontology Development Kit (ODK) has enabled the editors of dozens of bio-ontologies to utilize powerful automated workflows for maintaining, QC-ing, and releasing their products with ease. The ODK has had a huge positive impact on ontology standardization.

Nico leads the development of the widely used Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM), involving years of painstaking standards work, driving consensus on key design and modeling issues. He also led the efforts to unify multiple phenotype ontologies (Mammalian (MP), Zebrafish (ZP), Human (HPO), Ontology of Biological Attributes (OBA) through common design patterns.

Nico has recruited and encouraged a diverse range of contributors (researchers, government officials, clinicians as well as ontology developers) to grow and unite our community, promote open science, and provide mentorship. He is the ultimate team player and demonstrates unwavering positive energy and dedication to our community.

Thank you to the Award subcommittee:

  • Nicole Vasilevsky
  • Parul Gupta
  • Susan Bello
  • Ruth Lovering

Many thanks to the ISB members for voting!

Pascale Gaudet and Sandra Orchard – Recipients of the 2023 Exceptional Contribution to Biocuration Award

It is our great pleasure to announce the recipients of the 2023 Exceptional Contribution to Biocuration Award, the voting this year resulted in a tie and thus we have two recipients:

Pascale Gaudet, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Switzerland

Pascale Gaudet has worked in the biocuration field for over 19 years first at DictyBase and more recently NextProt and the Gene Ontology Consortium. Pascale is currently the GO Project Manager and oversees all editorial content. She has worked continually not only to improve the Gene Ontology structure and formalization, but also has driven the project to produce high quality phylogenetically inferred GO annotation using the PAINT annotation system. The PAINT annotations are much more specific than existing annotation from automated sources, because they can be refined on a family-by-family and even gene-by-gene basis. This system is now providing over 3.5 million annotation in the GOA annotation database.

Pascale is working constantly to refine legacy and dormant annotations across the ontology, and with multiple collaborating groups to refine the both ontology and annotation to ensure that both are fit for purpose. She is driving the coordination of overhauls in many areas of GO ontology including multi-species processes, transcription, chromatin remodeling, tacking each are with insight and attention to detail but never failing to see the bigger picture. She has been key to the communication between different interested groups and manages the numerous discussions with efficiency. This is work that almost every bench biologist depends on to some degree, but is largely unrecognized because it depends on thousands of incremental tasks that are not usually attributed or described in publications.

Sandra Orchard, EBI, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK

Sandra has worked tirelessly for the biocuration community for over 20 years. She is currently the Team Leader for Protein Function Content at UniProt (https://www.uniprot.org), and is therefore responsible for a major part of probably the most used biological database in the world. In this role, she also maintains two other key interfaces: the Complex Portal (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/complexportal) and the Enzyme Portal (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/enzymeportal/). Previously, Sandra led the IntAct molecular interaction database (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/intact) and managed the IMEx consortium of collaborating interaction databases. She has also been key in establishing standards within the proteomics community, and has made significant contributions to the InterPro database and the Gene Ontology. Sandra has always been a strong proponent of FAIR principles, education and the biocuration community: she has chaired and/or contributed to numerous biocuration-related committees; she established the first formal educational qualification in biocuration (PgCert at the University of Cambridge); and she has been a long-time supporter of the ISB, serving as treasurer from 2015-2018 and chair from 2018-2020. Sandra has published ~200 papers on biocuration methods, standards and databases, which serves as a measure of her impact and importance both to the biocuration community as well as to the researchers who depend on the many resources to which she has contributed.

Congratulations Pascale and Sandra!

Thank you to the Awards Committee:

  • Nicole Vasilevsky
  • Parul Gupta
  • Susan Bello
  • Ruth Lovering

Many thanks to ISB members for voting!

Posted in Uncategorized