<p>This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.</p> <p>The Annual Bio-Ontologies Meeting [1] has now reached its seventh consecutive year,
running as a special interest group (SIG) of the much larger ISMB conference. This
year's meeting in Glasgow had approximately 100 attendees. Since the advent of
the Gene Ontology, which coincided with the first Bio-Ontologies Meeting, we have
seen a year-on-year strengthening of the field; bio-ontologies has moved from being
dominated by computer science to be led by biological applications; discussion is less
about ‘what is an ontology?’ and more about ‘how to build an ontology which is fit
for purpose?’. This strengthening of the field can be seen elsewhere. Both the main
ISMB conference and this year's Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB) [2] have
seen a large number of submissions to their ontologies track. For the first time a
selection of the papers from the SIG is being published in this issue of 
<italic>Comparative and Functional Genomics</italic>. We hope that this will complement the publications of
the larger conferences, bringing to a wider audience the cutting edge research that
characterizes the Bio-Ontologies SIG.</p>
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Comp Funct Genomics. 2004 Aug-Oct; 5(6-7):498-500