Special Issue on Linked Data for Health Care and the Life Sciences

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CALL FOR PAPERS
Semantic Web Journal
Linked Data for Health Care and the Life Sciences
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Introduction
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Due to their descriptive nature and ongoing need to integrate large amounts of heterogeneous data, the areas of health care and the life sciences have long been used as a test-bed for the feasibility of Semantic Web technologies. Large scale integration projects like Bio2RDF, Chem2Bio2RDF, and the W3C HCLS’s (Health Care and Life Sciences) Linked Open Drug Data (LODD) have not only significantly contributed to the development of the Semantic Web’s Linked Data effort, but have also made social and technical contributions towards data integration, knowledge management, and knowledge discovery. As efforts are now being made towards exposing and integrating biomedically relevant data with standardized vocabularies and ontologies, new challenges have arisen towards creating applications for clinical research and ultimately improved delivery of health care. Towards the goal of semantic interoperability of data and vocabularies in and across health care in the life sciences and the development of new functionality that this infrastructure provides, we invite high-quality original papers for a special issue on Linked Data for Health Care and the Life Sciences. The following types of papers will be accepted: full research papers, methodology papers, review papers, descriptions of ontologies, and application reports.

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Topics
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Topics include but are not limited to:

Identifier schemes and systems
Biomedical ontologies, vocabularies, design patterns and datasets
Linked Data for the Life Sciences
Linked Data for Clinical Research
Linked Data for Health Care
Linked Data for Electronic Health Care records
Linked Data for Decision Support Systems
Linked Data for Semantic Interoperability in Health Care
Linked Data for Translational Medicine
Data consistency checking and validation
Provenance for biomedical data and scientific discourse
Quality and evaluation metrics
Hypothesis formulation and testing
Knowledge discovery
Scientific analyses over Linked Data
Query interfaces for scientists
Visualization of biomedical datasets
Large scale and real time reasoning

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Important Dates
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Manuscript submission: April 23rd, 2012.
Author notification: July 1st, 2012.

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Submissions
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The special issue on Linked Data for Health Care and the Life Sciences calls for high quality original articles on any of the above mentioned topics. Authors are requested to follow the author guidelines for the Semantic Web Journal, submit online as detailed in the author guidelines, and include the name of the call within the submission letter. All manuscripts will be reviewed based on the Semantic Web Journal open and transparent review policy and will be made available online during the review process.

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Guest editors
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Mikel Egaña Aranguren (megana@fi.upm.es), School of Computer Science, Technical University of Madrid (UPM), Spain.

Michel Dumontier (michel.dumontier@gmail.com), Department of Biology, Institute of Biochemistry and School of Computer Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.

Jesualdo Tomás Fernández Breis (jfernand@um.es), Faculty of Computer Science, University of Murcia (UM), Spain.

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Confirmed guest editorial board members (To be extended)
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M. Scott Marshall, University of Amsterdam
Eric Prud'hommeaux, W3C
Mark Wilkinson, University of British Columbia
Andrea Splendiani, Rothamsted Research
Erick Antezana, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Helena Deus, DERI
Richard Boyce, University of Pittsburgh
Nigam Shah, Stanford University
Oscar Corcho, Technical University of Madrid
Robert Stevens, University of Manchester
Barry Bishop, Ontotext
Stefan Schulz, Medical University of Graz
Jyotishman Pathak, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine
Damon Berry, Dublin Institute of Technology
Boris Villazón Terrazas, Technical University of Madrid
Raúl García Castro, Technical University of Madrid