2nd CFP: ACM TOIS Special Issue on Genomic Information Retrieval

Second Call for Papers

Special Issue of the ACM Transactions on Information Systems:
Genomic Information Retrieval

Submission deadline: October 31 2003
Author notification: February 13 2004
Revised papers due: March 19 2004
Publication: late 2004

Background:

Genomic information retrieval is an emerging area of intersection between
Information Retrieval and bioinformatics.
Bioinformaticians have defined their discipline as the ``research,
development, or application of computational tools and approaches for
expanding the use of biological, medical, behavioral or health data,
including those to acquire, store, organize, archive, analyze, or visualize
such data''*.
Information retrieval practitioners can bring substantial expertise to
bioinformatics through the rigourous application of existing techniques used
in text and multimedia retrieval for storing, organizing, analyzing, and
visualizing data.
Such expertise can be applied to the retrieval and management of collections
of genomic sequences, medical and biological literature, microarray data,
and other bioinformatics domains.
In particular, the application of retrieval algorithms and their systematic
evaluation in bioinformatics applications is becoming more important as
genomic collections continue to grow exponentially in size.

* This is a working definition proposed by the US National Insitutes of
Health. The working document can be found as
http://grants1.nih.gov/grants/bistic/CompuBioDef.pdf


Scope:

This special issue of the ACM Transactions on Information Systems will
provide a forum for researchers to formally contribute to cementing genomic
information retrieval as an emerging field.
Specifically, we aim to attract high-quality contributions that focus on
technical and evaluation aspects of genomic information retrieval. Topics of 
interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

(1) Algorithms for genomic information retrieval 

(2) Indexing, string and pattern matching, and querying of genomic data

(3) Retrieval performance evaluation of genomic search techniques, including
    efficiency and effectiveness studies, development of reference collections,
    user studies, and relevance assessment

(4) Novel compression techniques for genomic data

(5) Applications of text or multimedia retrieval techniques to
    bioinformatics, including retrieval models, categorisation, document
    preprocessing, clustering, summarization, web retrieval techniques, 
    and user interfaces for genomic information retrieval 

In particular, we seek papers that quantitatively evaluate techniques.
However, qualitative studies may be considered where appropriate. 


Submissions:

Inquiries can be made to Hugh E. Williams 
(hugh-MTgBGfZJYvW7NGdpmJTKYQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx). Manuscripts
can be submitted to the guest editor in electronic (PostScript or PDF)
format via email to hugh-MTgBGfZJYvW7NGdpmJTKYQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx or by mailing 
four hard copies to:

Hugh E. Williams
School of Computer Science and Information Technology
RMIT University, GPO Box 2476V,
Melbourne, Australia, 3001.

The deadline for submission of manuscripts is October 31 2003. Authors are
requested to notify the guest editor of their intention to submit and
provide an ASCII text abstract prior to submission. The guest editor would
be pleased to provide advice of the suitability of submissions.

Submitted manuscripts will be refereed by a panel of reviewers, and authors
notified by email on February 6 2004. Accepted papers will be published in a 
special issue of ACM TOIS in late 2004.

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