Proceedings of the 10th Computational Modeling in Biology Network (COMBINE) Meeting 2019

These are the conference proceedings of COMBINE 2019, the 10th Computational Modeling in Biology Network (COMBINE) meeting that took place in Heidelberg (Germany) from July 15th to July 19th, 2019.

The Computational Modeling in Biology Network (COMBINE) is an initiative to coordinate the development of the various community standards and formats for computational models in the life sciences. It was created in 2010 to enable the sharing of resources, tools, and other infrastructure, and to coordinate standardization efforts for modeling in biology. COMBINE brings standard communities together around activities that are mutually beneficial. These activities include making specification documents available from a common location, providing a central point of contact, and organizing regular face-to-face meetings. To this end, the COMBINE network organizes an annual conference style meeting (the COMBINE Forum) and annual hackathon style events called HARMONY (Hackathon on Resources for Modeling in Biology), as well as tutorials and training events.

At COMBINE 2019 a combination of keynote lectures, invited talks and interactive breakout discussions, as well as contributed talks, posters and lightning talks, selected from submitted abstracts, provided the basis for the meeting, offering diverse formats to exchange information, to discuss and work on interoperability problems and to demonstrate support for standards implemented in modelling tools, platforms and databases. One special focus of COMBINE 2019 was on the standardization need in systems medicine, which has been recognized as a necessity for computer-assisted personalized medicine. To direct attention to this topic, the European standardization framework for data integration and data-driven in silico models (EUSTANDS4PM) organized a workshop as part of COMBINE 2019. Also, reproducibility in modelling was a main topic, as reflected by several sessions and workshops. Besides these focus themes, also sessions, workshops and breakout discussions around single standards, their further development and their interoperability helped to advance the standardization, standing in the tradition of COMBINE.