Second CFP: SWAT4LS Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Life Sciences
Second CFP: SWAT4LS Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Life Sciences
(updates: scientific program, proceedings)

***Location and date
Amsterdam, Science Park, November 20th 2009
(http://swat4ls.org/2009/)


***Rationale

The adoption of semantic-enabled applications and collaborative social environments is ever more common in the Life Sciences. 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 Semantic Web in the Life Sciences has potential impact on the future of publishing, biological research and medecine. 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
        o Semantic Web standards and new proposals (RDF, OWL, SKOS,... )
        o Biomedical Ontologies and related tools
        o Formal approaches to large biomedical knowledge bases
  * Systems for a Semantic Web for Bioinformatics
        o RDF stores, Reasoners, query and visualization systems for life sciences
        o Semantic biomedical Web Services
        o Semantics aware Biological Data Integration Systems
  * Existing and prospective applications of the Semantic Web for Bioinformatics
        o Semantics aware application tools
        o Semantic collaborative research environments
        o Case studies, use cases, and scenarios

***Scientific Program

The workshop will be interactive and include keynotes, oral presentations, panel discussion and a poster and demo session.

The keynote speakers of this edition will be:
   * Barend Mons (http://www.biosemantics.org/index.php?page=barend-mons)
   * Michael Schroeder (http://www.biotec.tu-dresden.de/schroeder)
   * Alan Ruttenberg (http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/ruttenberg/)

***Scientific Committee (committed so far:)

  * Christopher J. O. Baker, Department of Computer Science and Applied Statistics, University of Brunswick, Canada
  * Pedro Barahona, Department of Informatics, New University of Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal
  * Liliana Barrio-Alvers, Transinsight GmbH, Dresden, Germany
  * Olivier Bodenreider, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, United States of America
  * Matt-Mouley Bouamrane, School of Computer Science, University of Machester, manchester, United Kingdom
  * Werner Ceusters, NY CoE in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, United States of America
  * Kei Cheung, Center for Medical Informatics, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, United States of America
  * Tim Clark, Center for Innovative Computing, Harvard University, United States of America
  * Marie-Dominique Devignes, LORIA, Vandoeuvre les Nancy, France
  * Olivier Dameron, INSERM U936, University of Rennes 1, France
  * Michel Dumontier, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
  * Huajun Chen, Zhejiang University, China
  * Duncan Hull, School of Chemistry, University of Manchester, UK
  * C. Maria Keet, Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy
  * Graham Kemp, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
  * Jacob Tilman Koehler, Department of Molecular Biotechnology, Institute of Medical Biology, University of Tromsö, Tromsö, Norway
  * Michael Krauthammer, Department of Pathology, Yale University School of Medicine, United States of America
  * Martin Kuiper, Department of Pathology, Systems Biology group, Department of Biology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
  * Patrick Lambrix, Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
  * Phillip Lord, School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom
  * M. Scott Marshall, Leiden University Medical Center / University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  * Chris Mungall, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, United States of America
  * Stephan Philippi, Institute for Software Technology, University of Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz, Germany
  * Marco Roos, Instituut voor Informatica, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
  * Alan Ruttenberg, Science Commons, Cambridge, MA, United States of America
  * Matthias Samwald, DERI, Galway, Ireland, and Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Altenberg, Austria
  * Nigam Shah, Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, Stanford, United States of America
  * Michael Schröder, Biotechnology Centre, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany
  * Robert Stevens, School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom
  * Tetsuro Toyoda, Genomic Sciences Center, RIKEN, Yokohama, Japan
  * Mark D. Wilkinson, iCAPTURE Center, St. Paul Hospital, Vancouver, Canada

and the organizers


***Type of contributions

The following possible contributions are sought:

  * Oral communications (regular papers)
  * Posters
  * Software demos


***Proceedings

All accepted oral communications and posters will be published with the CEUR-WS.org Workshop Proceedings service (see http://ceur-ws.org/).
We are finalizing the agreement to have a dedicated special issue on the 2009 edition of swat4ls in an international scientific journal of the BMC group (open access, pubmed indexed).
To this end, a special Call will be launched shortly after the workshop, for extended and revised versions of contributions submitted to the workshop and accepted either as oral communication or poster.


***Deadlines

  * Submission openinig: 1 September 2009
  * Submission of oral communications: 28 September 2009
  * Submission for posters and demos: 15 October 2009
  * Communication of acceptance: 23 October 2009
  * Camera ready: 6 November 2009


***Instructions

All papers and posters must be in English and must be submitted through the EasyChair review system at
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=swat4ls-09 .
Please upload all submissions as PDF files in LNCS format (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html).
To ensure high quality, submitted papers will be carefully peer-reviewed by at least three members of the Scientific Committee.
  * Submissions for Oral communications should be between 10 and 15 pages.
  * Posters submissions should be between 4 and 8 pages.
  * Software demo proposals should also be between 4 and 8 pages.


***Organization

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

***More information
* http://www.swat4ls.org/2009/
* http://swat4ls.blogspot.com
* info [at] swat4ls [dot] org