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), 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.

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.

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 Continuous Care Records (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

Type of contributions

The following possible contributions are sought:

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

Proceedings

Proceedings of SWAT4LS 2013 will be published in CEUR Workshop proceedings
(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)

Thematic series

Authors of accepted contributions to the upcoming edition of SWAT4LS will be invited to submit to the SWAT4LS thematic series of the BMC Journal of Biomedical Semantics.

Deadlines

Submission opening: July 10, 2013
Expression of interest for tutorials: August 5, 2013
Papers submission deadline (abstracts): September 15, 2013
Papers submission deadline (full text): September 22 29, 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

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=swat4ls2013

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