Overview

Biomedical ontologies and controlled terminologies provide structured domain knowledge to a variety of health information systems. The rich biomedical knowledge and information encoded in ontologies have been widely used in various learning tasks such as natural language processing (NLP), data mining, machine learning, semantic annotation, and automated reasoning. On the other hand, methods in NLP and machine learning have also advanced the curation of biomedical ontologies from mainly manual construction to (semi-)automated construction at scale.

Moreover, the increasing amount of health-related data poses unprecedented opportunities for mining previously unknown knowledge with semantics-powered data mining and analytical methods. However, due to the heterogeneity of different data sources ranging from electronic health records (EHRs) to environmental exposures, from social determinants of health to social media, it is challenging to exploit and integrate multiple sources to solve real-world problems. Biomedical ontologies and semantics-powered analytical methods are promising solutions.

We are inviting original research submissions as well as work-in-progress to the 6th International Workshop on Semantics-Powered Health Data Analytics (SEPDA 2021).

Topics

Topics of interest include but not limited to:

• Semantics-based Data Mining and Analytics
  • Ontology-based text mining and natural language processing
  • Semantics-powered data mining and machine learning from biomedical, clinical, or social web data
  • Information Extraction from biomedical, clinical, or social web data
  • Semantic annotation on biomedical, clinical or social web data
• Ontologies and Controlled Terminologies
  • Ontology development and enrichment
  • Quality assurance of ontologies and controlled terminologies
  • Semantic harmonization and ontology alignment
  • Knowledge representation and reasoning
  • Knowledge graphs
• Data Integration
  • Linked open data
  • Novel approaches for data integration of heterogenous data sources
  • Large scale data integration
• Application
  • Novel symbolic and semantic methods for pandemic surveillance
  • Novel tools and ontologies for data interpretation and visualization
  • Pharmacovigilance
  • Drug repurposing
  • Clinical trial generalizability assessment using ontologies
  • Algorithmic phenotyping and cohort identification using ontologies
  • Improving the literacy of health information consumers

Important Dates

• July 2, 2021 (Extended to July 25, 2021): Due date for workshop papers submission
• August 22, 2021: Notification of paper acceptance to authors
• TBA: Registration deadline
• November 6-8, 2021: Workshops

Submission Guidelines

We are inviting full paper submissions (up to 9 pages) as well as work-in-progress (up to 4 pages) to the 6th International Workshop on Semantics-Powered Health Data Analytics (SEPDA 2021).

Submissions must be in English formatted in the style of KR 2021. Submissions are not anonymous (i.e., reviewing will be single-blind) and have to be formatted using the following style files: KR21_authors_kit.zip

To submit the paper to SEPDA 2021, please visit this link: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=sepda2021#

Publication

SEPDA 2021 proceedings will be published in CEUR Workshop Proceedings (http://ceur-ws.org/). Authors of the accepted presentations will be invited to publish an extended paper in a peer-reviewed journal in biomedical and health informatics or semantic web.

Organizing

• Workshop Co-chairs
  • Zhe He, PhD, School of Information, Florida State University, USA
  • Cui Tao, PhD, School of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, USA
  • Jiang Bian, PhD, Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics, University of Florida, USA
  • Rui Zhang, PhD, Institute for Health Informatics and College of Pharmacy, University of Minnesota, USA
• Program Committee Members
  • James Geller, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA
  • Guoqian Jiang, Mayo Clinic, USA
  • Licong Cui, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, USA
  • Xia Jing, Clemson University, USA
  • Fleur Mougin, University of Bordeaux, France
  • Yonghui Wu, University of Florida, USA
  • Zhengxing Huang, Zhejiang University, China

Workshop Schedule

Past Workshops

• The first SEPDA workshop (SEPDA 2016) was successfully held in conjunction with IEEE BIBM 2016 in Shenzhen, China. Dr. Hua Xu, a leading expert in the field of Biomedical Informatics, gave the keynote speech on the bioCADDIE project. Eight high quality papers were published and presented. About 20 people attended the workshop. Selected papers were invited to publish the extended version to the special issue on “Semantics-Powered Healthcare Engineering and Data Analytics” in the Journal of Healthcare Engineering.
• The 2nd SEPDA Workshop (SEPDA 2017) was held in conjunction with IEEE BIBM 2017 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA. 17 high quality papers were published and presented. About 30 people attended the workshop. Extended journal version of the papers have been published in BMC Medical Informatics & Decision Making.
• The 3rd SEPDA Workshop (SEPDA 2018) was held in conjunction with IEEE BIBM 2018 in Madrid, Spain. 14 high quality papers were published and presented. Around 40 people attended the workshop. Extended journal version of the papers has been published in BMC Medical Informatics & Decision Making.
• The 4th SEPDA Workshop (SEPDA 2019) was held in conjunction with International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2019) in Auckland, New Zealand. 11 high quality papers were published and presented. Around 40 people attended the workshop. Six extended journal version of the papers was published in BMC Medical Informatics & Decision Making in December 2020.
• The 5th SEPDA Workshop (SEPDA 2020) was held in conjunction with IEEE BIBM 2020 virtually. Eight high quality papers were published and presented. Around 20 people attended the workshop. Eight extended journal version of the papers will be published in BMC Medical Informatics & Decision Making in September 2021.