Call for papers: Special Issue on

Semantic Web Meets Health Data Management

The COVID-19 pandemic has catapulted healthcare research as a top priority for many nations. Researchers have used data-driven approaches to better understand COVID-19, develop effective vaccines, and mitigate the spread of the virus. Healthcare data management continues to evolve as mankind faces the biggest public health crisis of modern times. As new kinds of data emerge, new models, algorithms, and techniques are needed to better harness the value of healthcare data for advanced decision making.

On the other hand, Semantic Web technologies can provide effective solutions for enabling interoperability and common language among healthcare systems, and can lead to the disambiguation of the information through the adoption of various terminologies and ontologies available. In addition, AI and machine learning can enable data-driven decision making and extracting meaningful insights from complex healthcare datasets. Thus, knowledge representation and reasoning on healthcare data become even more important. Semantic Web technologies have matured over the years and can provide these capabilities by design.

The purpose of the Special Issue is to collect contributions on the cross-cutting the fields of Semantic Web, data science, data management, and health informatics to discuss the challenges in healthcare data management and to propose novel and practical solutions for the next generation of data-driven healthcare systems. The ultimate goal is to enable new innovations in Semantic Web, knowledge management, and data management for healthcare systems to move the needle to achieve the vision of precision medicine.

Topics relevant to this special issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Bias in health semantic data and how to mitigate it
• Data cleaning in health data
• FAIRness (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) in health data management
• Explainable and interpretable analytics in health data management
• COVID-19 management through semantic technologies
• Artificial intelligence (AI) & machine learning in health data management
• Knowledge graph construction on health data
• Blockchain-based solutions for health data management
• Ontologies and data models on the health domain
• Semantic integration of heterogeneous health data sources
• Wearable and sensor data integration with health data
• Web-scale & cloud-based health data management systems
• NoSQL & Graph databases for health data management
• Semantic search & Reasoning over health data
• Recommendations for health data
• Exploratory search of health data via query reformulation, auto-completion, type ahead search, and approximate query-answering
• Health data exploration through visualization
• Analytics over large-scale health data – Personal health apps
• Data quality, profiling, and uncertainty of health data
• Data provenance and trust of health data
• Data versioning, evolution, change detection and representation
• Generation and aggregation of health semantics
• Natural language processing and text mining techniques for health data
• Novel techniques for security, privacy and sharing of health data
• Innovative use of semantic technologies for health data

Deadline

• Submission deadline: 1 May 2022 (extended!). Papers submitted before the deadline will be reviewed upon receipt.

Author Guidelines

Submissions shall be made through the Semantic Web journal website at http://www.semantic-web-journal.net. Prospective authors must take notice of the submission guidelines posted at http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/authors.

We welcome four main types of submissions: (i) full research papers, (ii) reports on tools and systems, (iii) application reports, and (iv) survey articles. The description of the submission types is posted at http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/authors#types. While there is no upper limit, paper length must be justified by content.

Extended versions of manuscripts published in conferences and workshops are welcome as long as the previous publications are clearly acknowledged and the new submission introduces substantial revisions and updates.

Note that you need to request an account on the website for submitting a paper. Please indicate in the cover letter that it is for the "Semantic Web Meets Health Data Management" special issue. All manuscripts will be reviewed based on the SWJ open and transparent review policy and will be made available online during the review process.

Also note that the Semantic Web journal is open access.

Finally please note that submissions must comply with the journal’s Open Science Data requirements, which are detailed in the corresponding blog post.

Guest editors

The guest editors can be reached at semantic-web-meets-health-data-management-swj@googlegroups.com .

Haridimos Kondylakis (FORTH-ICS, Greece)
Praveen Rao (University of Missouri, USA)
Kostas Stefanidis (Tampere University, Finland)

Guest editorial board

(tentative)

Satya Sahoo, Case Western, USA
Manolis Tsiknakis, HMU, Greece
Jaakko Peltonen, Tampere University, Finland
Srini Bhagavan, IBM, USA
Kostas Marias, HMU, Greece
Andreas Triantafyllidis, CERTH, Greece
Irini Fundulaki, FORTH-ICS -Valia Kalokyri, FORTH-ICS, Greece
Jyrki Nummenmaa, Tampere University, Finland
Santiago Hors-Fraile, Maastricht University: Maastricht, The Netherlands
Luis Fernandez-Luque, Adhera Health Inc, USA
Mihail Popescu, University of Missouri, USA