You Know OBO? Let's GO!

According to their website "The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry is a collaborative experiment involving developers of science-based ontologies who are establishing a set of principles for ontology development with the goal of creating a suite of orthogonal interoperable reference ontologies in the biomedical domain". This week they are having a workshop in Cambridge, to bring myself up to speed, here is a quick name check of some of the people involved.

• Michael Ashburner, University of Cambridge
• Erick Antezana, University of Ghent
• Colin Batchelor, Royal Society of Chemistry
• Dominic Clark, EBI Industry Programme
• Melanie Courtot, Vancouver, Canada, SBO?
• Lindsay Cowell, Duke University, School of Medicine
• Bernard de Bono, EBI
• Paula de Matos, EBI
• Kirill Degtyarenko, EBI / European Patent Office
• Dawn Field, University of Oxford?
• Frank Gibson, University of Newcastle
• George Gkoutos, University of Cambridge
• Janna Hastings, EBI
• David Hill, Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor
• Oliver Hofmann, Harvard University and South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI)
• Duncan Hull, University of Manchester, that's me!
• Nick Juty, SBO curator, EBI
• Nicolas Le Novère, EBI
• Suzanna Lewis, biontology.org, California
• Allyson Lister, University of Newcastle
• Jane Lomax, EBI, GO curator
• James Malone, EBI
• Jose Leonardo Mejino, University of Washington, Seattle
• Luisa Montecchi, EBI?
• Norman Morrison, University of Manchester
• Chris Mungall, bioontology.org, California
• Darren Natale, Georgetown University
• David Osumi-Sutherland, University of Cambridge
• Helen Parkinson, EBI
• Bjoern Peters, La Jolla, California
• Philippe Rocca-Serra, EBI
• Alan Ruttenberg, Science Commons, Boston, MA.
• Susanna-Assunta Sansone, EBI
• Richard H. Scheuermann, University of Texas
• Daniel Schober, EBI
• Lynn Schriml, The Institute for Genomic Research, TIGR?
• Barry Smith, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
• Christian Stoeckert, University of Pennsylvania
• Chris Taylor, EBI, MIBBI

Some of these people I've already met, many more are new to me. Hopefully it will be an interesting and productive workshop. One of the things I love about being a Scientist is all the mad wackaloons, dangerous megalomaniacs with crazy hair, egocentric nutcases, anally-retentive pedantic control freaks, obsessive-compulsive types, ambitious, creative and fascinating characters with great BIG ideas that you meet along the way (see list above!)

References

1. Barry Smith et al (2007) The OBO Foundry: coordinated evolution of ontologies to support biomedical data integration, Nature Biotechnology 25(11):1251-5. DOI:10.1038/nbt1346, pubmed.gov/17989687
2. OBO Foundry Workshop 2008 outcomes

(CC-licensed Oboe mechanics picture by starrise)