High-throughput next-generation sequencing technologies foster new cutting-edge computing techniques in bioinformatics

The advent of high-throughput next generation sequencing technologies have fostered enormous potential applications of supercomputing techniques in genome sequencing, epi-genetics, metagenomics, personalized medicine, discovery of non-coding RNAs and protein-binding sites. To this end, the 2008 International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (Biocomp) – 2008 World Congress on Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Applied Computing (Worldcomp) was designed to promote synergistic inter/multidisciplinary research and education in response to the current research trends and advances. The conference attracted more than two thousand scientists, medical doctors, engineers, professors and students gathered at Las Vegas, Nevada, USA during July 14–17 and received great success. Supported by International Society of Intelligent Biological Medicine (ISIBM), International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design (IJCBDD), International Journal of Functional Informatics and Personalized Medicine (IJFIPM) and the leading research laboratories from Harvard, M.I.T., Purdue, UIUC, UCLA, Georgia Tech, UT Austin, U. of Minnesota, U. of Iowa etc, the conference received thousands of research papers. Each submitted paper was reviewed by at least three reviewers and accepted papers were required to satisfy reviewers' comments. Finally, the review board and the committee decided to select only 19 high-quality research papers for inclusion in this supplement to BMC Genomics based on the peer reviews only. The conference committee was very grateful for the Plenary Keynote Lectures given by: Dr. Brian D. Athey (University of Michigan Medical School), Dr. Vladimir N. Uversky (Indiana University School of Medicine), Dr. David A. Patterson (Member of United States National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering, University of California at Berkeley) and Anousheh Ansari (Prodea Systems, Space Ambassador). The theme of the conference to promote synergistic research and education has been achieved successfully

R-LDA: Profiling RDF Datasets Using Knowledge-Based Topic Modeling

Recently, Linked Open Data (LOD) has experienced an exponential growth via publishing huge volume of datasets on the Web. This vast amount of information needs to be searched, queried, and interlinked easier than before. It is recommended that potential data publishers provide recapitulative information about their datasets published on the Web. This information, which functions as metadata, will facilitate those datasets to be discovered easily. As it is not always the case, we are faced with a large number of datasets without a proper profile, leading to a high demand for different data profiling techniques. In this paper, we focus on RDF dataset profiling utilizing unsupervised machine learning techniques, namely knowledge based topic modeling. We also investigate the use of Wikipedia categories to represent the topics identified in an RDF dataset. In the proposed model, we extract a number of representative topics for an RDF dataset and annotate them with Wikipedia categories. The union of the assigned categories serves as a profile of the dataset, in a sense that it provides an overall characterization of the content of the dataset