the 2nd International Workshop on Semantics-Powered Data Analytics (SEPDA 2017)

Biomedical ontologies and controlled terminologies provide structured domain knowledge to a variety of health information systems. The rich thesaurus with concepts linked by semantic relationships has been widely used in natural language processing, data mining, machine learning, semantic annotation, and automated reasoning. The dramatically increasing amount of health-related data poses unprecedented opportunities for mining previously unknown knowledge with semantics-powered data analytics methods. However, due to the heterogeneity of different data sources, it is a challenging problem to exploit multiple sources to solve real-world problems such as designing cost-effective treatment plan for patients, designing generalizable clinical trials, drug repurposing, and clinical phenotyping. The goal of this workshop is to bring people in the field of knowledge representation, knowledge management, and health data analytics to discuss innovative semantic methods, applications, and data analytics to address problems in healthcare, biomedicine, public health, and clinical research with biomedical, clinical, behavioral, and social web data.

We are inviting original research submissions (FULL 8 pages), work-in-progress (SHORT 4 pages), and poster abstracts (2 pages, NEW TYPE).

All the accepted papers (both SHORT and FULL) will be published in the BIBM 2017 Proceedings; Selected FULL paper will be published in the supplement of BMC Medical Informatics & Decision Making (IF: 2.042; Indexed in SCIE, MEDLINE, and PMC; and subject to an article processing charge of £1,122). Selected high-quality SHORT papers will also be invited to submit an extended version to the journal supplement for consideration.

Note: If a FULL paper is selected for possible journal publication, the authors will be asked to shorten their workshop paper to four pages to be published in the BIBM 2017 Proceedings and then submit the journal version after the workshop. The authors can still choose to publish their full papers in the conference proceedings, in which case however, the authors will NOT be eligible to publish in the journal supplement due to the journal’s self-plagiarism concern.

A new review process: To mitigate the biases and reduce the burden of the reviewer community, we will employ a hybrid approach in the review process of this workshop. We will invite external reviewers (in the Cyberchair system) as well as contributing authors to review the submissions (in the Pevals system). The final decision will be made based on the review reports from both systems. As such, the organizers, the external reviewers, as well as contributing authors will have a shared responsibility to maintain a high standard for the review process and ensure the quality of the workshop papers. To accommodate the busy schedule of the authors, you can choose the number of submission to review or not to participate in the peer-review in Pevals. In such a case, the decision will be made based on the external reviewers' review reports.