Systems Biology Data Management Foundry (19,20 March 2012)

Systems Biology Data Management Foundry: A meeting for practitioners

Data management is generally recognized as a crucially important but challenging part of Systems Biology. Data management systems that are useful, usable and used are difficult to get right. It is not easy to find out about already existing software, or the state of standards that could or should be adopted. We propose a meeting that enables practitioners in the field to meet like-minded scientists, show their working and upcoming developments, and give opportunities to team up and establish a Foundry for Systems Biology Software development. A meeting to socialize, yes. But also a meeting to figure out how we can improve collaboration of data management practitioners beyond project borders.

• how can we avoid reinventing the wheel, i.e. write solutions for one particular project that turn out to be non-interoperable with the component we would like to use for our next project?
• how can we overcome the scattering of bio data management over several communities, such as the database, semantic web, and bioinformatics communities? * how can we move from bespoke short-term maintained components to interoperable long-term maintained components?
• what would a Foundry for Systems Biology Software be?

To establish a practitioners community we have a program that focuses on active participation:

• Two invited talks about topics from data management from leading practitioners to warm us up and get us started.
• A series of innovative interactive show-and-tell sessions that take the best from scientific speed dating and lightning talks, and mean everyone gets to show off their software and drill down on others.
• On-the-fly break outs and clinics on best practices, standards in practice and anything else that comes up.
• Time and space for spontaneous hackathons. * Founding an online community Foundry for Systems Biology.

The workshop, sponsored by ERASysBio, will be held in Vienna. Participation is limited to 30 people. The intended participants are software developers working in the field of bio data management. Want to participate? You should be:

• fluent in at least one programming language
• be daily working as either as programmer or as someone concerned with software engineering or code audit.
• willing to participate in discussions about the (technical) future and extensibility of the software project you are involved with.

Participation in the workshop is free, however, we reserve the right to pick participants.

For application to this, please provide us with the following detail
Subject: Foundry workshop
In the message body:
Address,
The projects you are involved in,
links to software artefacts that function in those projects,
and any systems you are ready to demo at the meeting.

Please address the mail to information to wolfgang.mueller@h-its.org

Important dates:
8.2.2012: Application deadline
15.2.2012: Notification of acceptance.
19.3.2012-20.3.2012: Workshop in Vienna

The workshop is organized by
Carole Goble, University of Manchester
Wolfgang Müller, HITS gGmbH, Heidelberg
Bernd Rinn, ETH Zürich and SIB