Call for Papers
===========

The Ninth Annual Meeting of the ISMB BioLINK Special Interest Group:
Text Mining, Image Analysis, and the future of Scientific Publishing

In association with ISMB 2009, Stockholm, Sweden.
The BioLINK SIG will take place on Sunday, June 28 – Monday June 29, 2009
See http://www.cs.queensu.ca/biolink09 for details and updates.

New this year: The SIG will go beyond text to take into account the analysis
of images and figures in scientific publications, because of their critical
information content. Furthermore, we will include a session about the future of
scientific publishing, and the impact of information extraction methods (be
they based on text or on images) on producers and consumers of scientific
information.

With the increasing availability of publications and text related to biology,
including Medline abstracts and full-text journal articles, the field of biomedical
text mining has been rapidly maturing. It is concerned with using techniques
from natural language processing, information extraction and information
retrieval to automate knowledge discovery from biomedical text. As much of
the published material includes images, which are of utmost importance for
both scientists and database curators, the ability to automatically and
effectively mine image data is becoming increasingly critical – and draws much
interest. Thus the SIG this year will look at both aspects of published
knowledge – text and images.

As in previous years, the SIG will be interdisciplinary in nature, and will bring
together researchers developing text and image mining techniques, with
scientists from bioinformatics and biology who are potential end users of this
technology.

We solicit submissions from researchers working on all aspects of mining text
and image data in the scientific literature as they apply to bioinformatics and
bio-medicine. Suggested topics include (but are not limited to):

* New applications for text mining: bringing together end users and developers.
* Image analysis within documents/papers/publications.
* Integration of text and image data to address specific information needs.
* Emerging text and image mining tools, and how to make these tools available
to end users.
* New methods, measures and corpora for testing and evaluating literature
mining in the biomedical domain.
* Examples of text and image mining used to assist in database curation
* Incorporation of text-mining derived data into larger biological and
bioinformatics workflows.

The SIG provides an informal forum for presentation and discussion of current
research in the field. The program will include presentations of short papers,
posters and invited talks.

We are inviting submission in two categories:
1) short papers (up to 4 pages)
2) poster abstracts (up to 300 words).

Submissions, in PDF or MS word, should be sent, by the dates specified below,
to: biolink09@cs.queensu.ca

Authors should indicate the category for which their paper is to be considered
(short paper or poster in the subject line), and whether they would like their
work to be considered for an oral presentation. All accepted papers will be
included in the ISMB SIG notes. We are also considering the possibility of
having selected SIG papers revised and published as a special issue of a
journal in the area of bioinformatics.

Important Dates:
April 5: Short papers (up to 4 pages) due
April 15: Poster Abstracts (up 350 words) due
May 5: Notification to authors
May 15: Final version due

To register for BioLINK SIG, use the ISMB'09 registration form
(http://www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2009/).

Program Chairs:

Christian Blaschke, Bioalma, Spain
Hagit Shatkay, School of Computing, Queen's University, Canada
Lynette Hirschman, MITRE Corp., USA
Scott Markel, Accelrys' R&D group, USA
Robert F. Murphy, Carnegie Mellon University,Pittsburgh, USA
Alfonso Valencia, Spanish National Cancer Research Centre, Spain

Contact and submission email: biolink09@cs.queensu.ca