3^rd Int. Semantic Web Applications and Tools

for Life Sciences

Berlin, 10th December 2010

http://www.swat4ls.org/2010/

Overview

SWAT4LS is a workshop that provides a venue to present and discuss benefits and limits of the adoption of Web based information systems and semantic technologies in life sciences, biomedical informatics and computational biology.

 

Rationale

The web is a key medium for information publishing, and web based information systems play a key role in biomedical information exchange and integration. At the same time, the variety and complexity of biomedical information call for the adoption of semantic-based solutions. The Semantic Web provides a set of technologies and standards that are key to support semantic markup, ontology development, distributed information resources and collaborative social environments. Altogether the adoption of the web-based semantic-enabled technologies in the Life Sciences has potential impact on the future of publishing, biological research and medicine. This workshop will provide a venue to present and discuss benefits and limits of the adoption of these technologies and tools in biomedical informatics and computational biology. It will showcase experiences, information resources, tools development and applications. It will bring together researchers, both developers and users, from the various fields of Biology, Bioinformatics and Computer Science, to discuss goals, current limits and some real use cases for Semantic Web technologies in Life Sciences.

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Standards, Technologies, Tools for the Semantic Web
• Semantic Web standards and new proposals (RDF, OWL, SKOS, Linked Data, … )
• Biomedical Ontologies and related tools
• Alternative approaches to integrate semantic representations and web based solutions
• Formal approaches to large biomedical knowledge bases
• Systems for a Semantic Web for Bioinformatics
• RDF stores, Reasoners, query and visualization systems for life sciences
• Semantic biomedical Web Services
• Semantics aware Biological Data Integration Systems
• Existing and prospective applications of the Semantic Web for Bioinformatics
• Semantics aware application tools
• Semantic Wikis
• Semantic collaborative research environments
• Case studies, use cases, and scenarios

Type of contributions

The following possible contributions are sought:

• Research papers
• Position papers
• Posters
• Software demos

We are also accepting proposals for tutorials, hackathons or other related events to be held on Dec 8th (hackathons) and Dec 9th (tutorials). If interested, please contact info at swat4ls.org

 

Proceedings

All accepted communications will be published in the proceedings. Proceedings for the last editions of the workshop have been pubslished via the CEUR-WS.org Workshop Proceedings service (see http://ceur-ws.org/). Best papers will be invited to a journal special issue (probably BMC Bioinformatics).

Special issue

Authors of accepted contributions to the last editions of SWAT4LS have been invited to submit extended and revised contributions for a special issue in BMC Bioinformatics (dedicated to the SWAT4LS 2008 edition), and for a special issue of the BMC Journal of Biomedical Semantics (dedicated to the SWAT4LS 2009 edition, in preparation). We will continue with this approach and we will announce more detailed infomation as soon as we have reached an agreement with publishers.

Deadlines

• Submission openinig: 7 September 2010
• Papers submission deadline: 12 October 2010
• Posters and demo submission deadline: 1 November 2010
• Communication of acceptance: 8 November 2010
• Camera ready: 21 November 2010

Instructions

All papers and posters must be in English, formatted according to LNCS format (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html) 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.

Submission

All submissions will be handled via the EasyChair submission system. A link will be provided when registrations open.
To ensure high quality, submitted papers will be carefully peer-reviewed by at least three members of the Scientific Program Committee.

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Workshop Chairs

• Adrian Paschke, Corporate Semantic Web, Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany
• Albert Burger, School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, and Human Genetics Unit, Medical Research Council, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
• Paolo Romano, Bioinformatics, National Cancer Research Institute, Genova, Italy
• M. Scott Marshall, Adaptive Information Disclosure Group, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Andrea Splendiani, Biomathematics and Bioinformatics dept., Rothamsted Research, UK

Program Committee

See website http://www.swat4ls.org/2010/