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International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies Direct to Journal Track

2024 ICBO Conference Edited by: 

Karin Slater
University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

Robert Hoehndorf
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia

The International Conference on Biomedical and Biological Ontologies (ICBO) is a premier annual conference series that brings together researchers, students and professionals involved in the development and application of ontologies and knowledge graphs, and associated artificial intelligence technologies, in all areas of scientific research throughout the life and social sciences, including biology, medicine, diseases, human health, genome biology, human behaviour, environment, biomes, nutrition, food, plants, agriculture and others.

In an exciting partnership with the Journal of Biomedical Semantics (JBMS), we are introducing a direct to journal publication track for contributions to ICBO from 2021 onwards. Papers submitted to the International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies track at the Journal of Biomedical Semantics will be published immediately after acceptance and presented in the annual conference following acceptance. 

The new ICBO Thematic Series at the JBMS is soliciting submissions of novel (not previously published nor concurrently submitted) research papers in the areas of ontology design, development, evaluation and use, ontology interoperability, knowledge graphs, ontology-driven intelligent systems, ontologies for explainable AI, and the application of ontologies to biological and biomedical problems, across the full range of life sciences. In addition, we would like to invite contributions showcasing methods for ontology-based research, including statistical methods, tool support for ontologies and semantic technologies including for the annotation of data, visualisation, analysis, and related applications, and contributions addressing the challenges associated with working with multiple ontologies at the same time, including ontology alignment and matching. Submissions are welcome from a broad range of approaches to ontology building and use. 

Previous Guest Editors

2023: Stefan Schulz, Medizinische Universität Graz, Austria  and Amanda Damasceno de Souza, Universidade FUMEC, Brazil

2022: Janna Hastings, University of St.Gallen (HSG), Switzerland and Robert Hoehndorf, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia

  2. Evaluating the impact of environmental exposures on organism health is a key goal of modern biomedicine and is critically important in an age of greater pollution and chemicals in our environment. Environmenta...

    Authors: Lauren E. Chan, Anne E. Thessen, William D. Duncan, Nicolas Matentzoglu, Charles Schmitt, Cynthia J. Grondin, Nicole Vasilevsky, Julie A. McMurry, Peter N. Robinson, Christopher J. Mungall and Melissa A. Haendel
    Citation: Journal of Biomedical Semantics 2023 14:3
    Content type: Database Published on:

  3. The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and saf...

    Authors: Yongqun He, Hong Yu, Anthony Huffman, Asiyah Yu Lin, Darren A. Natale, John Beverley, Ling Zheng, Yehoshua Perl, Zhigang Wang, Yingtong Liu, Edison Ong, Yang Wang, Philip Huang, Long Tran, Jinyang Du, Zalan Shah…
    Citation: Journal of Biomedical Semantics 2022 13:25
    Content type: Research Published on:

  4. The Vaccine Ontology (VO) is a biomedical ontology that standardizes vaccine annotation. Errors in VO will affect a multitude of applications that it is being used in. Quality assurance of VO is imperative to ...

    Authors: Warren Manuel, Rashmie Abeysinghe, Yongqun He, Cui Tao and Licong Cui
    Citation: Journal of Biomedical Semantics 2022 13:22
    Content type: Research Published on:

  5. Drug repurposing can improve the return of investment as it finds new uses for existing drugs. Literature-based analyses exploit factual knowledge on drugs and diseases, e.g. from databases, and combine it wit...

    Authors: Bernd Müller, Leyla Jael Castro and Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann
    Citation: Journal of Biomedical Semantics 2022 13:3
    Content type: Research Published on:

  6. With COVID-19 still in its pandemic stage, extensive research has generated increasing amounts of data and knowledge. As many studies are published within a short span of time, we often lose an integrative and...

    Authors: Anthony Huffman, Anna Maria Masci, Jie Zheng, Nasim Sanati, Timothy Brunson, Guanming Wu and Yongqun He
    Citation: Journal of Biomedical Semantics 2021 12:18
    Content type: Research Published on:

  7. In recent years a large volume of clinical genomics data has become available due to rapid advances in sequencing technologies. Efficient exploitation of this genomics data requires linkage to patient phenotyp...

    Authors: Şenay Kafkas, Sara Althubaiti, Georgios V. Gkoutos, Robert Hoehndorf and Paul N. Schofield
    Citation: Journal of Biomedical Semantics 2021 12:17
    Content type: Research Published on:

  9. Incorporating the feedback of expert stakeholders in ontology development is important to ensure content is appropriate, comprehensive, meets community needs and is interoperable with other ontologies and clas...

    Authors: Emma Norris, Janna Hastings, Marta M. Marques, Ailbhe N. Finnerty Mutlu, Silje Zink and Susan Michie
    Citation: Journal of Biomedical Semantics 2021 12:4
    Content type: Review Published on: