WHAT IS CODATA ?: CODATA, the Committee on Data for Science and Technology, is an interdisciplinary Scientific Committee of the International Council for Science (ICSU), was established over 30 years ago. CODATA works to improve the quality, reliability, management and accessibility of data of importance to all fields of science and technology.

[THE WORKSHOP SCOPE]
A number of urgent crises are rising to the human life: The attack of terrorists is hard to predict, due to the hidden leaderships. New diseases are hard to extinguish, due to their new causes. New products may be shortly abandoned, due to the appearance of new desires of consumers.
A common feature to these socially high-impact problems is that they are open to multiple scientific domains. For example, the source of a causal virus of SARS is still unclear. For solving this problem, we require the collaboration of across medical science, food science, ecological science, zoology, and the analysis of data from these scientific domains. This workshop aims at developing data-based aiding methods and methodology for interdisciplinary creative communication about an emerging social problem.

[THE PLAN OF WORKSHOP]
2006 is the first year: For setting a grand challenge, we discuss how we can reduce the risk of side-effects of medicines and the human-caused errors in the timing and the manners of treatments. Each participant is expected to make a presentation about his/her studies or thoughts on this issue, from individual background expertise. The discussions may include the effects of medicines and treatments, the effect of combining Western and Eastern medicines, human-factors in nursing errors, the detection of signs of side-effect, etc.
However, we shall not restrict the discussion to medical problems. Although we set up from medical topics, we aim at a generic multi-data approach to urgent social issues. We expect methods for medical treatment can be extensively applied to other domains such as marketing solutions, earthquake predictions, etc. Researchers from various domains such as Medical Science, Risk Management, Data Mining and Knowledge/Chance Discovery, Evidence extraction and Link Discovery, Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences, and real-world domains where discovery techniques has been applied, are welcome to join us.
This workshop shall grow. For the first year (2006), it is encouraged that each participant brings his/her own data or the analysis results on the data, to show an original approach to the target problem, i.e., how to reduce the risks in medicines and medical treatments. For example, hepatitis physician might analyze blood-test data, and a text mining expert might work on patients' diaries from the Web. However, philosophy discussion without data analysis result is also encouraged.
Through years, the workshop can be extended to collaborations with exchanging data, the link information to access interesting data, and effective methods to analyze and think for each other participant. We can provide a sharable data about medicines, to participants if they prefer. We are planning to develop a sponsored project and publications, on the fruits of the first few years of this workshop.

[SUBMISSION]
By July 1 (2006), send a paper between six and twelve pages, on the ``Proceedings and Other Multiauthor'' format of Lecture Notes of Compute Sciences, Springer Verlag., to the chair. See http://www.springer.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,,5-164-2-72376-0,00.html We are planning to publish selected papers from an international publisher.

[IMPORTANT DATES]
July 1, 2006: The Paper Submission Due (extended!!)
June 15, 2006: Notification of Acceptance and Others
August 1, 2006 (tentative plan): The Camera Ready Due
One day between 23 and 25 October, 2006: The Workshop

[CO-CHAIRS]
Contact Chair: Yukio Ohsawa,
Associate Professor, Dept. Quantum Engineering & System Science, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo
E-mail: ohsawa@q.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp,
7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656 Tel/fax: +81-3-5841-7012

Shusaku Tsumoto, Professor, Department of Medical Informatics, School of Medicine, Shimane University

Ning Zhong, Professor, Department of Information Engineering, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Japan, and Director of The WICI/BJUT.

Yong Shi, Professor, Director of Research Center on Data Technology and Knowledge Economy, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Loreozo Magnani, Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Pavia, Piazza Botta 6, 27100 Pavia, Italy