BOSC 2009

BOSC 2009 will be held for 2 days in conjunction with the 17th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2009) in Stockholm, Sweden. ISMB 2009 will be held jointly with the 7th Annual European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB 2009). The dates of BOSC 2009 are June 27 - 28; the main ISMB/ECCB Conference runs June 29 - July 2, 2009. Click here to see past BOSC conferences.

• If you wish to join the BOSC 2009 Organizing Committee, please send an e-mail to bosc@open-bio.org. Conference planning is being discussed on the Discussion page.
• If you wish to be on the mailing list for BOSC-related announcements, including the call for abstracts and deadline reminders, please subscribe to the Bosc-announce list.

Overview

The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) is sponsored by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (O|B|F), a non-profit group dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development within the biological research community. To be considered for acceptance, software systems representing the central topic in a presentation submitted to BOSC must be licensed with a recognized Open Source License, and be freely available for download in source code form.

Many open source bioinformatics packages are widely used by the research community across many application areas and form a cornerstone in enabling research in the genomic and post-genomic era. Open source bioinformatics software has facilitated rapid innovation, dissemination, and wide adoption of new computational methods, reusable software components, and standards. One of the hallmarks of BOSC is the coming together of the open source developer community in one location to meet face-to-face. This creates synergy where participants can work together to create use cases, prototype working code, or run bootcamps for developers from other projects as short, informal, and hands-on tutorials in new software packages and emerging technologies. In short, BOSC is not just a conference for presentations of completed work, but is a dynamic meeting where collaborative work gets done and attendees can learn about new or on-going developments that they can directly apply to their own work.

Important Dates

• February 16, 2009: Registration for ISMB and BOSC Opens
• Monday, April 13: Abstract deadline
• May 1, 2009: Notification of accepted abstracts
• May 15, 2009: Early Registration Discount Cut-off date
• Saturday, June 27 and Sunday, June 28, 2009: BOSC 2009!

Sessions

This year’s conference will mark the 10th anniversary of BOSC. To celebrate the special occasion, the theme of this year’s conference is “Looking Back and Looking Ahead: Open Source Solutions to Grand Challenges in Bioinformatics.” We are inviting abstracts for two different types of talks:

• Descriptions of a particular open source software implementation by a member of the development team, especially in the areas listed below
• Reviews of open source software that compares and contrasts different solutions to the same bioinformatics problem.

In addition, we are asking all speakers to come prepared to lead an informal tutorial on their software during a Birds of a Feather/hackathon session. This year’s topics include:

• Design Patterns in Bioinformatics
• Regulatory Genomics
• Multicore and GPGPU computing
• Data & Analysis Management (shared session with DAM SIG)
• Computational Grids
• Visualization

There will also be updates from O|B|F-sponsored projects, and as always, abstracts may be submitted for open source software that does not fit neatly into the above categories. Lightning Talks will also highlight very recent developments.

Abstract Submission Information

The deadline for abstract submissions is Monday, April 13. Abstract submissions will not be accepted via e-mail this year. All abstracts were submitted through our EasyChair site (opening soon).

Abstracts must be one page in length and submitted as a PDF file only. Please observe the following formatting guidelines

• Use 1 inch (2.5 cm) margins on the top, sides, and bottom of the page.
• List the title at the top of the page.
• Next list the authors with the presenting author's name underlined.
• Next give the author affiliations, including the e-mail address of the presenting author.
• Next list the URL for the overall project web site
• The URL for accessing the code
• The particular Open Source License being used

Accepted talks will be 10-20 minutes, depending on the session. You will be notified of the length of your talk upon abstract acceptance.

Open Source License Requirement

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation, which is the sole sponsor of BOSC, is dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source Software Development within the Biological Research Community. For this reason, in order to be considered for acceptance, any talk submitted to be presented at BOSC which concerns a specific software system to be used by the research community must be licensed with a recognized Open Source License, and be available for download by anyone using ftp, cvs/subversion, or as a tar/zip file from the Project Website.

See the following websites for further information:

• Recognized Open Source Licenses
• Definition of the Open Source Philosophy

Contact

Chair of Organizing Committee

• Kam D. Dahlquist (Loyola Marymount University)
  • Oversight of entire conference

Co-Chair

• Lonnie R. Welch (Ohio University)
  • Design patterns, regulatory genomics.

Members

• Hilmar Lapp (BioPerl, BioSQL, and NESCent)
• Jens Lichtenberg (Ohio University)
  • Publications
• Frank Drews (Ohio University)
  • Multicore and gpgpu computing
• Andrew Dalke (Dalke Scientific, Goteborg, Sweden)
• Jim Procter (University of Dundee, Scotland)
  • Visualization
• Seán I. O' Donoghue
  • Visualization
• Anton Nekrutenko (Penn State University)
  • Overlap with Data Management & Analysis SIG

For more information about the conference or the call for abstracts, please contact the organizers at bosc@open-bio.org.