Title

Vaccine and Drug Ontology Studies

Workshop type

Project Workshop (Project specific talks + Discussions)

Organizer

Cui Tao, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

Vaccines and drugs have contributed to dramatic improvements in public health worldwide. There have been efforts from various areas in the biomedical ontology community that extend existing health and clinical terminology systems (e.g., SNOMED, RxNorm, NDF-RT, and MedDRA), vernacular medical terminologies, and their applications to research and clinical data associated with vaccines and drugs. This workshop will provide a platform for showcasing and discussing innovative solutions and challenges in the development and applications of biomedical ontologies to represent and analyze vaccines and drugs, their administration, immune responses induced, adverse events, and similar topics. The workshop will cover two main areas: (i) ontology representation of vaccines/drugs and related domains, and (ii) ontology applications in real world situations. Examples of biomedical subject matter in the scope of this workshop: drug components (e.g., drug active ingredients, vaccine antigens and adjuvants), administration details (e.g., dosage, administration route, and frequency), gene immune responses and pathways, drug-drug or drug-food interactions, and adverse events. Both research and clinical subjects will be covered. We will also focus on computational methods used to study these, for example, literature mining of vaccine/drug-gene interaction networks, meta-analysis of host immune responses, time event analysis of pharmacological effects, and ontology-based software development.

We have successfully organized four workshops in the VDOS workshop series in conjunction with ICBO. The first one was on July 21, 2012 at Graz, Austria (VDOSME 2012, http://kr-med.org/icbofois2012/vdosme/) and the second one was on July 7, 2013 at Montreal, Qc, Canada (VDOS 2013, http://informatics.mayo.edu/CNTRO/index.php/Events/VDOS_2013). The third on was on Oct 7, 2014 at Houston, TX (VDOS 2014, https://sites.google.com/site/vdosworkshop/). The fourth one was on July 27, 2015  at Lisbon. The VDOS workshop series has attracted people from different fields and from different countries. All the accepted full papers by the VDOS workshop have been published on the Journal of Biomedical Semantics (JBMS, http://www.jbiomedsem.com) after additional rounds of independent peer reviews. Detailed information about the first three special issues can be found here. 2012: http://www.jbiomedsem.com/series/VDOSME; and 2013: http://www.jbiomedsem.com/content/5/1/16/.  2014: http://www.jbiomedsem.com/series/VDOSM14/. The fourth special issue is still under review/revision.

Our proposed workshop aims to provide an international platform for the researchers and scientists in the vaccine and drug communities to demonstrate research progresses, share ideas, address questions, and promote collaborations for better representation and analysis of vaccine and drug-related terminologies and clinical and research data.

We propose a half-day ICBO workshop for this year. We will arrange 3 hours for paper presentation and 1 hour for intensive discussions. Different sessions will be arranged based on the topics of presentations. Depending on the number of papers accepted for presentation, each paper presentation will be restricted to 10-25 minutes for a full-length paper, and 5-15 minutes for a short-length paper. All the papers will be submitted and handled through EasyChair and go through peer reviews by at least two reviewers. After the full papers are accepted, we will work with the JBMS editors and reviewers to decide which papers will be formally invited for extension to be included in a thematic series in the JBMS journal.    
Various methods will be used for advertisement, including:

1. posting in email mailing lists and through private emails;
2. creating a workshop discussion email list address and using it for sharing news and posting,
3. posting in influential websites (e.g., ICBO general meeting website),
4. phone calls to colleagues and friends who may be interested,
5. generating a workshop website dedicated to this event, and inviting potential attendees to visit, and
6. generating a social networking website in LinkedIn to attract public attention, participation, and discussion.

The main difference between the workshop website and the LinkedIn website will be that the workshop website is dedicated for posting the workshop information, and the LinkedIn website is used for social networking to attract public attention, participation, and discussion.