Applications of data integration in the life sciences have started to provide significant results. For example, the eMERGE Network has recently demonstrated that combining phenotype information extracted from electronic medical records with genotype information in order to study the relationship between genome-wide genetic variation and common human traits is a viable and cost-effective alternative to the traditional genome-wide association studies (GWAS).

Of course, such studies leverage the foundational work of the past decade on biomedical data integration (architectures, data models, ontologies, privacy, etc), which had paved the way for life sciences infrastructures, such as ELIXIR, the open source Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) platform, and federated query tools, such as the Shared Health Research Information Network (SHRINE).

The increasing availability of "big data", coming from high-throughput analytical techniques, large clinical data repositories, the biomedical literature and online resources, offers exciting opportunities to researchers, but also poses new integration challenges.

DILS 2012 is the 8th in a series on international conferences that aim at fostering discussion, exchange, and innovation in research and development in the areas of data integration and data management for the life sciences. Researchers and professionals from biology, medicine, computer science and engineering are invited to share their knowledge and experience.


Topics of Interest

DILS provides a forum for the discussion of various aspects of data integration in the life sciences, including challenges and technical solutions to address them, as well as applications to biomedical problems. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Architectures and data management techniques for the life sciences
* Query processing and optimization for biological data
* Biological data sharing and update propagation
* Query formulation assistance for scientists
* Modeling of life sciences data
* Biomedical data integration issues in eScience
* Laboratory information management systems in biology (including workflow systems)
* Quality assurance in integrated data repositories
* Biomedical metadata management (including provenance)
* Mining integrated life sciences data and text resources
* Standards for biomedical data integration and annotation
* Scientific results arising from innovative data integration solutions
* Exposing biomedical data for integration purposes (APIs, Linked Open Data, SPARQL endpoints)
* Creation and use of clinical data repositories
* Data integration in clinical and translational research
* Integration of genotypic and phenotypic data
* Challenges and opportunities with "big data" in the life sciences
* Ethical, legal and social issues with biomedical data integration


Submission Guidelines

* Research papers

Authors are invited to submit original contributions of practical relevance and technical rigor, experience reports and demonstrations of relevance to data integration in the life sciences. DILS 2012 invites two types of research papers:

1. Long papers (up to 16 pages) -- to present results of original research
2. Short papers (up to 8 pages) -- to present ongoing research

(Papers describing commercial solutions are welcome as long as sufficient detail of the problem and its technical solution are provided.)

The proceedings of DILS will be published by Springer in Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics. Detailed instructions for preparing the camera-ready copy of your paper are available in Springer's LNCS Author and Volume Editor Instructions (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs/lncs+authors?SGWID=0-40209-0-0-0). The authors of the best papers will be recognized at the conference and invited to submit an extended version of their paper to a journal.

* Posters and demonstrations

In addition to research papers, DILS welcomes posters and demonstrations. A one-page abstract should be submitted. Posters and demos will be presented in the poster/demo session at the conference. The poster/demo abstracts are not part of the proceedings, but will be published on the DILS web site.


Please submit your paper using the DILS 2012 EasyChair site:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dils2012


Important dates

- Abstract submission: February 13, 2012 (for all research papers)
- Research papers due: February 20, 2012
- Author notification: March 19, 2012
- Poster/demo due: April 2, 2012
- Camera-ready copy due: April 9, 2012
- Conference: June 28-29, 2012