General Workshop Agenda

The general format of the workshop will follow the successful convention of past workshops which ran for two full days.

The major issues on which multi-cell modeling community has to agree on include:

1. How to define “static” cellular behaviors and properties? A Markup Language approach (ML) is most natural but there has to be agreement on the terminology and scope of the ML.
2. How to handle “dynamic” cellular behaviors and properties (i.e. those which change during simulation). Currently this task is accomplished using either compiled or scripting languages. How can these dynamic behaviors be described in the ML?
3. How to describe links to different modeling scales such as subcellular and tissue scales? This type of linkage will allow modelers to reuse models described in e.g. SBML or CellML.
4. How to implement a "software toolkit" equivalent to e.g. libSBML that will allow modelers to integrate the CBMSL into their modeling environment as easily as possible.

Deliverables

We aim to

1. Refine the current specification of the Cell Behavior Model Specification Language (CBMSL) and discuss possible development strategies.
2. Write a summary of the progress on CBMSL and recommending solutions and or strategies for further CBMSL development and ultimate deployment.
3. Engage a large community of researchers to actively participate in the CBMSL efforts. In particular, we would like to form closer collaborations with researchers from the systems biology community who have experience in setting/maintaining model description standards.