Call for papers

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), Paris (2012) and Edinburgh (2013).

The next edition of SWAT4LS will be held in Berlin, DE, December 9-11th December 2014. It will be articulated in a workshop day (10th), a tutorials day (9th) and an hackathon day (11th).

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 and Linked-Data technologies in health care and the life sciences.

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. The Semantic Web in particular provides a set of interoperable standards and technologies that support knowledge representation, ontology development, machine reasoning, distributed information resources, and collaborative research environments.
The variety and complexity of biomedical information requires these kind of technologies and altogether, the adoption of the Web-based semantic technologies in health care and the life sciences is having an impact on 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.

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.: RuleML, RDF, OWL, SKOS, SPIN, 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

 

Type of contributions

The following possible contributions are sought:

  • Tutorials
  • Research papers
  • Position papers
  • Posters
  • Software demos

Proceedings

Proceedings of SWAT4LS 2014 will be published in CEUR Workshop proceedings (http://ceur-ws.org/).

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 (tbc).

Deadlines

Submission opening: June 30th, 2014
Expression of interest for tutorials: August 5th, 2014
Papers submission (abstracts): September 7 22, 2014
Papers submission deadline (full text): September 15 30, 2014
Posters and demos submission deadline: October 17, 2014
Communication of acceptance: October 27, 2014
Camera ready paper: November 18, 2014
Tutorials Mon, December 9, 2014
Workshop Tues, December 10, 2014
Hackathon Wed, December 11, 2014*

(*) the hackathon may be extended to one extra optional day, pending confirmation of venues.

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).

Submission

All submissions will be handled via the EasyChair submission system.

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=swat4ls2014

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

Tutorials

Tutorial proposals consist of a brief description of the rationale for the tutorial, its content and the experience of presenters, they should be sent via email at info@swat4ls.org no later than August 5th. However, tutorials will be accepted on an ongoing basis and we encourage early submissions.