SWAT4LS 2013 - Semantic Web Applications and Tools for the Life Sciences

Call for Papers and Tutorials

 

6th International Workshop on Semantic Web Applications and Tools for the
Life Sciences (SWAT4LS 2013) Edinburgh, UK  Dec. 9-12, 2013

 <http://www.swat4ls.org/workshops/edinburgh2013>
http://www.swat4ls.org/workshops/edinburgh2013

 

Overview

 

Since 2008, the SWAT4LS Workshop has provided a platform for the
presentation and discussion of the benefits and limits of applying web-based
information systems and semantic technologies in the domains of health care
and life sciences. SWAT4LS has been held in Edinburgh (2008), Amsterdam
(2009), Berlin (2010), London (2011), and Paris (2012).

 

Growing steadily each year as Semantic Web applications have become more
widespread, the program of SWAT4LS has grown to include associated events.

The next edition of SWAT4LS will be held in Edinburgh, UK, December 9-12,
2013, preceded by tutorials and followed by hackathon / model-a-thon.

 

We are confident that the next edition of SWAT4LS will provide the same open
and stimulating environment that has previously brought together
researchers, developers, and users, from various fields including eHealth,
biomedical and clinical informatics, systems biology, computational biology,
drug discovery, bioinformatics and biocomputing, to discuss goals, current
limits and real experiences in the use of Semantic Web technologies in
health care and the life sciences.

 

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Rationale

 

The Web is a key medium for information publishing, and Web-based
information systems play a key role in biomedical information exchange and
data integration. At the same time, the variety and complexity of biomedical
information call for Semantic Web solutions.  The Semantic Web provides a
set of interoperable standards that support knowledge representation,
ontology development, machine reasoning, distributed information resources,
and collaborative research environments. Altogether, the adoption of the
Web-based semantic technologies in health care and the life sciences has
potential impact on the future of publishing, as well as biological and
clinical research. This workshop will provide a venue to present and discuss
the benefits and limits of adoption of these technologies. It will showcase
experiences, information resources, tool development and applications. It
will bring together researchers, both developers and users, from biology,
bioinformatics, computer science!

, and the clinic to discuss goals, current limits and use cases for Semantic
Web technologies.

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Topics

 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

 

- Semantic interoperability of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and clinical
trial data

- Connecting clinical practice and clinical research

- Enabling translational medicine and personalized medicine

- Interactive Knowledge Browsing and Semantic Web approaches to Big Metadata

- Harnessing biomedical ontologies and terminologies with medical standards
for information exchange

- Standards such as HL7, BRIDG, CDISC, DICOM, EN13606, ISO 18308, openEHR,
together with medical terminologies and ontologies such as SNOMED, NCIt,
LOINC, MedDRA, ICD, CTCAE, ATC for international Continuity of Care Record
(CCR) and transmural care

- Clinical Decision Support Systems

- Methods for reusing patient data in clinical research

- Patient recruitment, eligibility studies, and OWL/RDF models of
eligibility criteria

- Semantic Web standards and new proposals (e.g.: RDF, OWL, SKOS, SPIN,
RuleML, Microformats)

- Tools for ontology mapping, editing, annotation, versioning and provenance
management

- APIs and Tools for access to (distributed) knowledge bases
(e.g.multi-agents, rest apis, semantic web services, OMG API4KB)

- Semantic Scientific Workflows and eScience processes

- RDF stores, NoSQL, reasoners, query and visualization systems

- Knowledge representation for biomedical knowledge bases

- Applications of query federation for distributed knowledge, data sharing,
and data discovery

- Access control and data security for medical data

- Tools for semantics-enabled Web publication

 

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Type of contributions

 

The following possible contributions are sought:

- Tutorials

- Research papers

- Position papers

- Posters

- Software demos

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Proceedings

 

Proceedings of SWAT4LS 2013 will be published in CEUR Workshop proceedings (
<http://ceur-ws.org/> http://ceur-ws.org/).

(see DBLP for the SWAT4LS proceedings of the last years:

 <http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/swat4ls/index.html>
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/swat4ls/index.html)

 

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Special issue

 

Authors of accepted contributions to the upcoming edition of SWAT4LS will be
invited to submit to a special issue of the BMC Journal of Biomedical
Semantics.

 

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Deadlines

 

Papers submission deadline (abstracts):         September 15, 2013

Papers submission deadline (full text):        September 22, 2013

Posters and demos submission deadline:         October 18, 2013

Communication of acceptance:             November 4, 2013

Camera ready paper:                     November 18, 2013

Tutorials                          Mon, December 9, 2013    

Workshop                           Tues, December 10, 2013

Hackathon                            Wed-Thu, December 11-12, 2013

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Instructions:

 

All papers and posters must be in English and submitted in pdf format.

 

Submissions for papers should report original research, and should be
between 8 and 15 pages.

Submissions for position papers should report qualified opinions,
recommendations or conclusions, and should be between 3 and 6 pages.

Submissions for posters should be between 2 and 4 pages.

Submissions for software demo proposals should also be between 2 and 4
pages.

 

Please upload all submissions as PDF files based on the LNCS format (
<http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html>
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html).

 

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Submission

 

All submissions will be handled via the EasyChair submission system.

 

 <https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=swat4ls2013>
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=swat4ls2013

 

To ensure high quality, submitted papers will be carefully peer-reviewed by
at least three members of the Scientific Program Committee.