ICBO 2025 conference

16th International Conference on Biological and Biomedical Ontology¶

The International Conference on Biological and Biomedical Ontology (ICBO) is a premier annual conference series covering the development and application of ontologies for biological and medical domains. Researchers, students, and professors working in biomedical ontology are welcome to submit.

Theme of Conference¶

Biological and Biomedical Ontologies in Action for Health, Science, and Sustainability

Important Dates¶

• Conference Dates:
• Workshops/tutorials: (see Program page for more detail)
• Annotating Data with Ontologies: LinkML Can Help: (11/5/2025)
• 14th Vaccine and Drug Ontology Studies (VDOS) 2025 Workshop: (11/7/2025)
• Workshop for PhD Students & Early Career Researchers: (11/10/2025)
• Food, Waste, and Sustainability: Synergizing Ontology Efforts: (11/14/2025)
• Accelerating Ontology Curation with Agentic AI and GitHub: (11/18/2025)
• Main conference: November 9th to November 11th (11/9/2025-11/11/2025)
• ICBO-EAST Satelite meeting in Japan: November 1st (11/1/2025)
• 10:00 - 17:30 JST
• Submission Dates:
• Workshops and Tutorial Proposal submission deadline: June 30th (6/30/2025) July 7th (7/7/2025)
  • acceptance: July 15th (7/15/2025)
• Direct-to-Journal Track submission deadline: July 31st (7/31/2025) August 10th (8/10/2025) August 15th (8/15/2025)
  • acceptance: October 1st (10/1/2025)
• Main Conference submission deadline: August 17th (8/17/2025) August 31st (8/31/2025)
  • acceptance: October 15th (10/1/2025)
• East Satellite submission deadline: August 24th (8/24/2025) September 7th (9/7/2025)
  • acceptance: September 30th (9/30/2025)
• Short Talks submission deadline: October 24th (10/24/2025)
  • acceptance: October 31st (10/31/2025)

Call for ICBO Conference Papers¶

Submission deadline: August 31st, 2025. Notification: October 15th, 2025

The following paper categories are welcome:

• Full length papers: 8-12 pages (Including references).
• Short papers: up to 7 pages (Including references).
• For each paper accepted, at least one author must register.
• Submission link: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICBO2025/Submission/Index

More information can be found here

Call for Direct-to-Journal Track Papers¶

Direct-to-journal track submission deadline: August 15th (8/15/2025). Notification: October 15th, 2025

In collaboration with the Journal of Biomedical Semantics (JBMS)

Papers submitted to the International Conference on Biological and Biomedical Ontology track at the Journal of Biomedical Semantics will be published immediately after acceptance and presented in the annual conference following acceptance.

The new ICBO Thematic Series at the JBMS is soliciting submissions of novel (not previously published nor concurrently submitted) research papers in the areas of ontology design, development, evaluation and use, ontology interoperability, knowledge graphs, ontology-driven intelligent systems, ontologies for explainable AI, and the application of ontologies to biological and biomedical problems, across the full range of life sciences. In addition, we would like to invite contributions showcasing methods for ontology-based research, including statistical methods, tool support for ontologies and semantic technologies including for the annotation of data, visualisation, analysis, and related applications, and contributions addressing the challenges associated with working with multiple ontologies at the same time, including ontology alignment and matching. Submissions are welcome from a broad range of approaches to ontology building and use.

More information can be found here

Submission link: https://jbiomedsem.biomedcentral.com/articles/collections/icboseries

Call for Short Talks¶

Short talks submission deadline: October 24th (10/24/2025). Notification: October 31st, 2025

We are now accepting submissions for short talks at ICBO 2025. These will be virtual, 10-15 minute talks. They are intended to encourage cooperation on projects with the ICBO community and to provide an opportunity to receive feedback. The talks allow presenters to show off ongoing work which might not yet be ready for a full publication. Submissions should be in the form of abstracts and can be submitted using the link here

Keynote Speakers¶

tbd

Setting¶

The 16th International Conference on Biological and Biomedical Ontology (ICBO 2025) will be held virtually over Teams.

Hybrid participation may be available for the Japan-based SWO session at the ISWC 2025 venue in Nara for ICBO-EAST

Contact Information¶

Please direct all further questions to Asiyah Yu Lin (ontology.world@gmail.com)