rd 3 International Conference on Biomedical Ontology The International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO) was organized for the third time in 2012. It was initially a biannual conference, organized in Buffalo, NY, and it has since evolved into an annual conference, of which the 3rd edition was held in Graz, Austria, on July 21-‐25, 2012, collocated with the 7th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS). The conference and these proceedings clearly illustrate both the need for a venue to address issues pertaining to biomedical ontology (and ontologies, if you will), and the progress made in the field. The discipline of Ontology has become relevant in practice with the evolution of complex information systems which rely on robust and coherent representations. The use of biomedical ontologies in annotation of both clinical and experimental data is now a common technique in integrative translational research. To be maximally effective, such ontologies must work well together. As they become more widely used, coordination problems require innovative solutions. There are still numerous challenges in ontology engineering, ontology theory, and ontology education. These proceedings provide balance between biological and medical ontology, between formal rigor and tooling for ontology development and evaluation, and between development and application of ontologies.
These proceedings are published in the KR-‐MED series, which cover conferences dealing with Formal Biomedical Knowledge Representation.
We are confident that these proceedings will contribute to spreading the ideas shared during the conference.
Ronald Cornet, Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Robert Stevens, University of Manchester, United Kingdom Chairs of the ICBO 2012 Scientific Program Committee