Ensembl Developers' Workshop at Genome Informatics 2009

Ensembl announces a workshop for developers that will take place at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). The workshop runs from Friday 30th October until Sunday 1st November, following the Genome Informatics meeting.

As this workshop is aimed at developers, we will be exploring Ensembl beyond using the website. Participants will be expected to have experience in programming and a background in object oriented programming techniques. Familiarity with Perl, a Unix/Linux environment, databases and structured query languages (MySQL) are needed to follow the workshop and the programming examples. We would like to point out that this is not a 'learning how to program in Perl' workshop.

Several Ensembl developers will present sessions on how to create your own resources based on our APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and how to extend the Ensembl system.

The course will start Friday afternoon and finish on Sunday around lunch time, and will most likely be in the IT Training Room.

The workshop will be given by:

Bronwen Aken (Ensembl Genome Annotation team)
Jan-Hinnerk Vogel (Ensembl Genome Annotation team)
Paul Kersey (Ensembl Genomes)

At the end of this course, attendees will

have a good understanding of Ensembl's annotation pipeline;
know how to customise a local installation of the Ensembl website;
and have hands-on experience with the annotation pipeline.

There is no registration fee to attend this course, but we ask you to register in advance because the number of attendees is limited by the size of the training venue. Please note that the workshop runs after the conference (Friday 30th October - Sunday 1st November), so don't forget to arrange additional accommodation for the workshop days.

We (Bron and Jan) are currently reviewing the content of the 'standard workshop' we've presented in earlier years (2008). If you have any topics which you would like to explore further, please let us know. If enough interest, we will offer an 'Ensembl Solexa Special' module, which will include the mapping of short-read data to genomes which have been annotated in Ensembl. Please let us know if you are interested in this.

To register your interest to attend send an email to Xosé M. Fernández (xose@ebi.ac.uk), with your details.

We will circulate an agenda amongst participants.

We are grateful to CSHL for their help in organising this course.

The Ensembl Team