Overview

As part of an international undertaking and collaboration between Belgian Science Policy, Science Commons, StrainInfo.net, Genomics Standards Consortium, Bioversity International and the US national committees of CODATA, IUMS and IUBS an international conference on the building of an integrated infrastructure in microbial research dealing with issues such as bioinformatics, intellectual property rights, material transfer agreements, text mining and integration with genomics databases will be organised the 12th and 13th of June 2008 at Het Pand Conference Centre in Ghent.

This meeting is organized back to back with the annual meeting of the European Culture Collections Organisation, ECCO.

More information on the scientific background to the conference topics can be found

• on the StrainInfo.net bioportal, a prototype of information integration services for the microbial community
• in the scientific background document to the meeting
• the papers published in the special issue on the microbial commons, International Social Science Journal, Vol. 188