Matching disease and phenotype ontologies in the ontology alignment evaluation initiative.

Background: The disease and phenotype track was designed to evaluate the relative performance of ontology matching systems that generate mappings between source ontologies. Disease and phenotype ontologies are important for applications such as data mining, data integration and knowledge management to support translational science in drug discovery and understanding the genetics of disease.

Results: Eleven systems (out of 21 OAEI participating systems) were able to cope with at least one of the tasks in the Disease and Phenotype track.

ISCB's initial reaction to New England Journal of Medicine editorial on data sharing.

This message is a response from the ISCB in light of the recent the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) editorial around data sharing.

Paving the future: finding suitable ISMB venues.

The International Society for Computational Biology, ISCB, organizes the largest event in the field of computational biology and bioinformatics, namely the annual international conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, the ISMB. This year at ISMB 2012 in Long Beach, ISCB celebrated the 20th anniversary of its flagship meeting. ISCB is a young, lean and efficient society that aspires to make a significant impact with only limited resources.

Design and implementation of microarray gene expression markup language (MAGE-ML).

Background: Meaningful exchange of microarray data is currently difficult because it is rare that published data provide sufficient information depth or are even in the same format from one publication to another. Only when data can be easily exchanged will the entire biological community be able to derive the full benefit from such microarray studies.

Results: To this end we have developed three key ingredients towards standardizing the storage and exchange of microarray data.