CFP NETTAB 2009: deadline approaching
Last Call for Papers

NETTAB 2009 Workshop on
"Technologies, Tools and Applications for Collaborative and Social Bioinformatics Research and Development"
with a Special Session on:
"Methods and Tools for RNA Structure and Functional Analysis"

June 10-13, 2009
Department of Computer Science, University of Catania, Italy

http://www.nettab.org/2009/

Deadline approaching: April 28, 2009: Oral communication submission
Contributions must be short papers of around THREE A4 pages or 12.000 characters long.
Submit through the EasyChair system at: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nettab2009 .
See web site for details.

Motivation
The most recent developments of collaborative development tools are impressive. Researchers can now collaboratively develop software (open source systems), discuss and compare development strategies (social networks), write documents (google docs, wiki systems), build knowledge bases. So, it may now be the time for presenting current technologies, tools and applications for collaborative work and for discussing perspectives of their utilization in support of Bioinformatics.
For these reasons, NETTAB 2009 will be devoted to "Technologies, Tools and Applications for Collaborative and Social Bioinformatics Research and Development".
The RNA community is also taking advantage of collaborative research tools such as Wikis and other virtual environments. The RNA WikiProject contains now over 600 articles describing families of noncoding RNAs based on the Rfam database, and invite the community to update, edit, and correct those articles. Therefore, the NETTAB  2009 special session will focus on collaborative research project, computational methods and tools for the analysis of RNA structures and functions, with a special emphasis on ncRNAs.

Invited Speakers (more to be announced)
# Alex Bateman
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK
# Tim Clark
Director of Informatics, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease Neurology Research Department, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA
# Duncan Hull
School of Chemistry, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
# Gabriel Valiente
Technical University of Catalonia, Department of Software, Barcelona, Spain
# Debora Marks
Systems Biology Department, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA

Topics
- Collaborative Web sites (bioinformatics.org, biojava, bioperl, …)
- Communities of Practices (CoPs)
 Scientific practices in scientific communities
 Automatic detection / gathering / modelling of scientific practices
 Implementations of CoPs
- Social networking (myExperiment, Annotea, myScience)
 Social Bookmarking
 Semantic Document Markup
 Relationships mining from literature
- Open Source development
 Sharing of data models, libraries, interfaces
- Social software for collaborative documentation development
 Wikis, blogs, google docs
 Knowledge Wikis
 Social-software-mediated collaborative scientific research
 Social-software-mediated collaborative tools' development
 Knowledge base collaborative development
 Ontologies collaborative development
- Education and training tools
 E-learning
 Virtual environments

Methods and Tools for RNA Structure and Functional Analysis
- RNA structure prediction
- Collaborative studies of RNAs
- ncRNAs functional analysis and classification
- miRNAs and networks
- Genome-wide functional studies
- Identification of ncRNAs
- Databases of ncRNAs and miRNA targets
- miRNA targets prediction
- Synthetic miRNA and siRNA design
- Gene expression analysis
- Analysis of viral RNAs
- RNAi therapeutics
- Identification of ncRNAs biomarkers
- RNA-protein interaction prediction

Deadlines
Contributions for both oral communications and posters must be short papers of around THREE A4 pages or 12.000 characters long.
They must be submitted through the EasyChair system at: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nettab2009 .

- April 28, 2009: Oral communication submission
 Acceptation communication: May 12, 2009
- May 15, 2009: Posters submission
- May 17, 2009: Early registration
- June 10-13, 2009: Tutorials and Workshop

Calls for SPECIAL ISSUES
We plan to launch Calls for Special Issues on the themes of the workshop in peer-review journals with associated Impact factor around July for submission in September 2009.