BOSC 2008

I’ve been invited to present a keynote address at the 9th Annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) in Toronto, Canada on July 18th. This event is one of several Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings occurring in conjunction with the 16th annual Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology Conference (ISMB 2008) and is sponsored by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (O|B|F), a non-profit group dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development within the biological research community. The main themes of this year’s BOSC are around emerging technologies and hard problems in bioinformatics. These include infrastructure and data modeling, collaborative technologies, workflows, visualization, and best practices of software design and engineering.

My keynote is entitled “Croquet: An Open Collaboration Architecture for Scientific Visualization and Simulation”. I plan to discuss how virtual contexts can support the collaborative activities involved in the “doing of science”. I will also demonstrate the NSF-sponsored Cobalt application and how it is being developed to support collaboration, scientific visualization, and provide a much-needed infrastructure for the process of data access and software development at a distance.