Conference: Workshop on Facilitating Microbial Research Through Advanced Data Management Infrastructure to be held October 27-29, 2003 in Arlington, VA

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The objective of this workshop is to allow scientists to reach a mutual understanding of theneeds of microbial research, to understand how these needs can be addressed through animproved data management infrastructure, and to provide a roadmap for implementation of such an infrastructure. The workshop will facilitate the understanding of the available data management and knowledge extraction technology, the future direction of this field, and how it can be used to advance microbial research. Recent advances in the life sciences have resulted in an increasing amount of scientific data. This valuable data has been stored in separate databases. However, there are no efficient mechanisms that allow scientists to issue complex queries including multidatabase queries. Yet such mechanisms would considerably improve the rate at which scientists process and analyze the data compressing the cycle from investigation to discovery. This workshop will bring together scientists who are impacted by the emergence of these numerous databases, since they use these databases on a regular basis to advance microbial research. In addition, the workshop will include a number of researchers in information technology with interests in databases and information retrieval. The workshop will feature speakers from academia, industry and research centers. Some of the speakers will present their experience in maintaining microorganism databases such as the TIGR Comprehensive Microbial Resource. Other speakers will focus on the state of the art in database management and information retrieval issues including database integration, ontologies and semantic web technology. Furthermore, the workshop will include speakers with interests in microbial research that relies on microorganism databases.The workshop will expose database researchers to the challenges of microbial research and encourage them to use these challenges as real life study cases when developing new data management systems. The workshop will provide a forum for an exchange of ideas from scientists and researchers with different backgrounds. The outcome of the workshop will be a data management infrastructure implementation plan of importance to the entire field of microbial biology.