Programme

Visions of Systems Biology carry hopes of understanding biology better thereby enabling the improvement of a range of practices within our society. In particular, systems biology holds promises for enhancing the health sector and being an essential approach towards personalized medicine. Innovative interdisciplinary collaborative structures as well as experimental and computational infrastructures are needed if any of these visions are to come to fruition.

This satellite focuses on the building of knowledge management (KM) structures, broadly understood as computing systems built to collect, make sense of and reason about information of biological parts and their dynamic interactions.

We are interested in questions like the following:

• Systems biology (SB) begs for new modalities for the publication of results: What are the drawbacks of the current way of publishing and how can we enable a productive scientific discourse in systems biology?
• How can/should desired research issues and answers steer appropriate KM development? What are the scientific and epistemic challenges in building KM for SB?
• Which choices were made that resulted in the current KM infrastructure and the research issues and answers that are favored by this infrastructure?  What are the ramifications for biotechnology and health sectors that make use of these KM infrastructures?
• How can interdisciplinary work contribute? How should it be conducted to address challenges related to SB enabling and shaping other sectors, such as the health sector?

We invite participants to identify and discuss key past and present choices made in designing knowledge management systems with respect to the need to ensure the effectiveness and appropriateness for research (like systems biological or medical research questions).  The workshop brings together scholars from the humanities as well as the natural sciences.  

 --This meeting is a satellite to VPH 2014