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: November 1st (11/1/2025)
• online general session: 10:00 - 13:00 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 26th (10/26/2025)
  • 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 26th (10/26/2025). 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/Invited Talks¶

We are pleased to announce several of the distinguished keynote speakers who will be joining us at ICBO 2025. Each of these speakers has made exceptional and lasting contributions to the bioinformatics and ontology communities. As leading voices in our field, their work is critical to the development and expansion of bioinformatics and bio-ontology.

• Main Conference
• Keynote: Mark Musen: Conspiracy theories: Are ontologies really under attack? (Sunday Nov 9, 12:15pm-1:00pm ET)

  Dr. Mark Musen is a Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Stanford University and Division Director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research. His research centers on open science, data stewardship, intelligent systems, and biomedical decision support. He also currently directs the WHO Collaborating Center for Classification, Terminology, and Standards. Further, he has been a lead developer on Protégé and is the founding co-editor in chief of the journal Applied Ontology.

• Invited Speaker: Giovanni Nisato: Bridging Industry and Ontology: Insights from the Pistoia Alliance (Monday Nov 10, 11:05-11:30am ET)

  Dr. Giovanni Nisato is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) who received his PhD in Physics from the University of Strasbourg. He holds multiple positions, including as the Founder and Managing Director of Innovation-Horizons, a consultant and project manager for Pistoia Alliance, and an Affiliate Professor at Grenoble Ecole de Management. His work centers around promoting collaboration within domains such as health care and sustainable development.

• Keynote: Michel Dumontier: Ontologies for Semantic Interoperability in the Age of AI (Tuesday Nov 11, 11:05am-11:50am ET)

  Dr. Michel Dumontier is the Distinguished Professor of Data Science and founder at Maastricht University and is the founder and Director of the Institute of Data Science at Maastricht University. He is also a co-founder of the FAIR data principles. His work focuses on building and mining knowledge graphs for drug discovery and personalized medicine. He is also editor-in-chief for the journal Data Science.

• ICBO-EAST
• Keynotes: Achille Zappa and Yukie Akune-Taylor: Glycoscience data and ontologies for understanding the expanded central dogma (Saturday Nov 1, 10:05am-10:45am JST)

  Dr. Achille Zappa and Dr. Yukie Akune-Taylor are conducting research at Glycan and Life Systems Integration Center (GaLSIC) at Soka University with Professor Kiyoko Aoki-Kinoshita. Their work focuses on exploring the complex functions of glycans using computational analysis and data mining techniques. This includes the development of glycan semantic knowledgebases, linked-data schemas, and ontologies, as well as the analysis of glycan-protein-lipid interactions.

• Invited Speaker: Bairong Shen: Disease-Specific Ontology-Driven Intelligent Medicine (Saturday Nov 1, 11:10am-11:50am JST)

  Dr. Bairong Shen is the Director and Professor of the Institute of System Genetics at West China Hospital of Sichuan University. Currently, he also serves as a visiting professor at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle and the University of the Basque Country in Spain. He is the head of the virtual teaching and research laboratory for the "Medical Data Collection and Analysis based on Science, Technology, and Information" course under the "101 Plan" of the Ministry of Education. Since returning to China in 2008, he has led more than 10 national projects and supervised over 100 graduate students. He has published over 300 papers in international interdisciplinary journals and edited more than 10 English and Chinese books in the field of translational informatics. His research interests include the theory of biomarker discovery, biomedical data sharing and security, and intelligent chronic disease management.

• Keynote: Jian Du: Utilizing Large Language Models to Build Causal Diagrams for Observational Health Research (Saturday Nov 1, 12:15pm-12:55pm JST)

  Dr. Jian Du obtained his PhD degree from School of Information Management, Nanjing University. He is am now an assistant professor at the National Institute of Health Data Science, Peking University. He has a mixed background of Biomedical Informatics and Library & Information Science. Before joining Peking University, he served as a research scientist at Institute of Medical Information, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. Since 2020, he has led the Computable Biomedical Knowledge Group (cbk.bjmu.edu.cn), which focuses on natural language processing, literature mining and knowledge graph construction, and their applications in clinical epidemiology for major chronic diseases. His group is currently funded by the National Key R&D Program for Young Scientists and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Dr. Du also contributes to the academic community as an editorial board member for Scientific Data, Health Data Science and BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making.

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)