Gatherings in Biosemiotics intend to establish a regular framework for discussions of biosemiotics in the context of biology. Gatherings in Biosemiotics are international annual meetings for scholarly exchange of ideas and views in semiotic biology. The conference language is English.

During the final decade of the century we just left behind, biosemiotics grew from being an idea inside the heads of a few (semioticians, theoretical biologists, ethologists ...) to becoming a more widely recognized perspective for the study of the "signs of life" as well as  the "life of signs". Due to its unifying vision biosemiotics has obvious implications for a  diversity of separate fields inside physics, biology, medicine, psychology, anthropology, semiotics, and philosophy as well as cross-disciplinary research programs such as cognitive science, artificial life or autonomous agents. Biosemiotic analysis may also offer interesting new ways of evaluating biological technology. On the other hand, biosemiotics may be seen as a fundamental new approach to theoretical biology.

Biosemiotics has been on the agenda of many international meetings, and the 1990s also saw a couple of publications devoted to biosemiotics proper. Until 2001 biosemiotics was not the prime focus for any regular international activity, but hitchhiked on other initiatives. This was a fruitful way to initiate the new field of research, but then a more focused platform was needed for a more in-depth discussion of biosemiotics as a biologically grounded domain of study.