Data intensive disciplines, such as life sciences and medicine, are promoting vivid research activities in the area of databases. Modern technologies, such as high-throughput mass-spectrometry and sequencing, micro-arrays, high-resolution imaging, etc., produce enormous and continuously increasing amounts of data. Huge public databases provide access to aggregated and consolidated information on genome and protein sequences, biological pathways, diseases, anatomy atlases, and scientific literature. There has never been more potentially available information to study biomedical systems, ranging from single cells to complete organisms. However, it is a non-trivial task to transform the vast amount of biomedical data into actionable information, triggering scientific progress and supporting patient management. Major biomedical application scenarios for research in the database community include, but are not limited to:

    Systems biology
    Genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics
    Genome-wide association studies
    Drug target discovery and personalized medicine
    Neuroscience and neuroinformatics
    Electronic patient records
    Patient monitoring
    Surgery planning and support
    Other relevant applications

Various emerging database technologies for coping with the challenges of these application scenarios have been developed and are an active area of research in information technology:

    Administration of vast amounts of data
    Integration of heterogeneous data sources
    Federated and distributed databases
    Data warehouses
    Data mining techniques such as classification, clustering, association rule mining, etc.
    Decision support systems
    Information and image retrieval
    Signal processing and streaming databases
    Privacy protection and data security
    Data quality assurance
    Process management and collaborative work
    User interfaces and visualization
    Interoperability and standardization
    Other relevant applications

Designing database technology to support applications in life sciences and medicine is an inspiring field of interdisciplinary research. The path from an idea or concept to a practical application is often long and laborious, involving intensive interactions between experts in information technology, life sciences and the medical field. ITBAM accompanies and supports this path by providing an excellent venue for the exchange of ideas, fruitful discussion, and effective interaction among interdisciplinary researchers. In addition to the regular conference program featuring presentations of full and short research papers published in the proceedings, ITBAM encourages the submission of posters reporting work in progress. All accepted posters will be displayed during the whole event and abstracts will be included in the proceedings.