The First International Biocurator Meeting to be held on December 8-11, 2005 at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacifice Grove, CA.

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This award provides partial support for the first International BioCurator Meeting (IBCM), to be held on December 8-11, 2005 at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, CA. The overall objective of this conference is to bring together the diverse group of scientists worldwide who create and maintain the content of the biological databases so vital to modern biomedical and biological research. The majority of the audience will be database curators and curator assistants. Database curators are typically scientists with Ph.D. in biology or a related field, often with some years of post-doctoral research experience. Curator assistants are typically graduate undergraduate students, or recent graduates with a B.A. or M.A. in biology or a related field. We also expect participation by projects heads (professors, project managers, lead scientists), postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and database and software developers. The conference will convene over a period of two and a half days and will consist of daytime oral sessions and evening poster sessions covering four major topics: literature curation and collection, genome sequence annotation and comparative genomics, ontology development, and curation of large-scale functional genomics data. Oral sessions will include three hour-long plenary lectures and 20 shorter talks (20 or 30 minutes each). Twelve of the shorter talks will be given by invited speakers, and the remainder will be chosen from the abstracts submitted. There will be a moderated discussion session at the end of each day. The poster sessions will be dedicated to developments in curation tools, techniques, and quality control, and will also include demonstrations of informatics resources. The objectives for this meeting are to stimulate communication within the biocurator community in order to enhance the quality of these database resources, and to promote the recognition of biological curation as a profession. As the sheer volume of biological information increases exponentially, the importance of databases in keeping it organized and easily accessible to the entire international research community also increases. Thus although the direct audience for this meeting may be currently composed of several hundred people, the implications of this meeting for improved curation and integration of biological data reach to the entire international biomedical and biological research community.