ICBO 2025: 16th International Conference on Biological and Biomedical Ontology conference

General Information

The International Conference on Biological and Biomedical Ontology (ICBO) is a premier annual conference series that brings together researchers, students and professionals involved in the development and application of ontologies in all areas of biology, medicine, diseases, human health, genome biology, environment, biomes, nutrition, food, plants, agriculture and others. Together, they address issues pertaining to coordinated development of ontological resources, data standards, as well as the optimal use of ontologies in applications.

As the biomedical sciences continue to generate and rely on complex, large-scale data, ontologies remain essential for enabling semantic clarity, data integration, and interoperability. In recent years, the growing role of AI and data-driven research has further increased the demand for robust, FAIR, and sustainable ontology infrastructures.

ICBO 2025 invites contributions that explore both foundational and applied aspects of biomedical ontologies, with a special focus on long-term sustainability, governance, tooling, and the evolving role of ontologies in AI-enabled biomedicine.

ICBO 2025 will be held online as a full virtual event.

The focus of our 2025 conference is Biological and Biomedical Ontologies in Action for Health, Science, and Sustainability.

Important Dates

ICBO Conference Proceeding Publication Requirements

All conference submissions accepted will be published in the CEUR Workshop Proceedings as part of the new IAOA series. An example from a past conference can be seen here.

In order for this to happen, the following requirements must be satisfied:

  1. All submissions should be in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) and should follow the CEUR-Template-1col.docx file, single column.
  2. The template in OverLeaf (LaTEx) version, is tbd.
  3. Ensure that the conference name, date, and place, and email addresses and ORCIDs of all authors are added to the footnote on the lower left of the first page.
  4. Note that the template (.docx version) provided in the link above already includes the standardized copyright footer for ICBO 2025 with the conference name and date. You only need to fill in the EMAIL and ORCID information for each author.
  5. All papers for ICBO MUST have an accompanying signed Author Agreement to Publish a Contribution as Open-Access on CEUR-WS.org prepared by the corresponding author. Please download one of the ICBO 2025 customized form bellow:
    1. AUTHOR-AGREEMENT (NTP): Authors shall use this form if they included no copyrighted third party material in their paper text (or accompanying sources, datasets). This is the right variant in most cases.
    2. AUTHOR-AGREEMENT (TP): Authors shall use this form if they did include copyrighted third party material in their paper or accompanying material. They must then also attach a copy of the permission by the third party to use this material in the signed author agreement!
  6. Fill in the fields on the AUTHOR-AGREEMENT form, print it out, sign it in ink (by hand), then scan or photograph the form and both upload it on official administrative website and send it to: ontology.world@gmail.com with a subject heading that reads "Author Agreement for submission PAPER [PAPER-ID]".
    • Do NOT digitally sign the pdf, as CEUR-WS.org will not accept it. CEUR-WS.org allows an alternative method to provide a signature if you are unable to print the form, as shown here: http://ceur-ws.org/agreement-paper1.jpg
  7. Update your camera-ready paper on the official administrative website .

Call for ICBO Conference Papers

conference paper submission deadline: August 17th, 2025. Notification: September 15th, 2025

The following paper categories are welcome:

Call for Direct-to-Journal Track Papers

Direct-to-journal track submission deadline: July 31st, 2025. Notification: October 1st, 2025

  • In collaboration with the Journal of Biomedical Semantics (JBMS)
  • Papers submitted to the International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies 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 Workshops, Tutorials, and Demos

    Workshop submission deadline June 30th (6/30/2025) July 7 2o25. Notification July 15th 2024.

  • Submission link: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICBO2025/Track/3/Submission/Create
  • Workshops can be half or full day (3 or 6 hours) virtual or onsite.

    • Call for ICBO EAST

    ICBO East submission deadline August 24th 2025. Notification September 17th 2025.

  • Submission link: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICBO2025/Track/1/Submission/Create

    • Software demo

    Please submit any software application using ontologies.

    Topics of Interest

    We are interested in all topics related to ontologies and knowledge representation in biomedicine, biology, and life sciences. Topics include but are not limited to:

    Methodologies and Tools

    Scientific Domains (all biomedicine, biological, and life sciences related domains are welcome)

    Virtual Paper presentations guidelines

    Acknowledgment

    The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.

    Program Committee ICBO 2025

    Contact Information

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