Overview

SWAT4LS is a workshop that provides a venue to present and discuss benefits and limits of the adoption of Semantic Web technologies and tools in biomedical informatics and computational biology. The first edition, held in Edinburgh in November 2008, received 40 submissions, of which 13 were accepted as oral communications, and part of them was included in a special issue of BMC Bioinformatics dedicated to the workshop.
The second edition, held in Amsterdam in November 2009, received a total of 27 submissions, and presented a more varied program with 6 full papers, 3 keynotes, 5 demos, 3 short talks, posters session and a panel discussion. This edition has been evaluated unanoumosly well by participants and a special issue on the Journal of Biomedical Semantics dedicated to this workshop is in preparation.
The next edition of SWAT4LS will be held in Berlin, on the December 10th 2010.
We hope that the next edition of SWAT4LS will provide the same open and stimulating environment that brought together researchers, both developers and users, from the various fields of Biology, Bioinformatics and Computer Science, to discuss goals, current limits and real experiences in the use of Semantic Web technologies in 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 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 environemnts. 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 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, Linked Data,… )
o Biomedical Ontologies and related tools
o Alternative approaches to integrate semantic representations and web based solutions
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 Wikis
o Semantic collaborative research environments
o Case studies, use cases, and scenarios

Type of contributions

The following possible contributions are sought:

* Research papers
* Position papers
* Posters
* Software demos