19th August 2007, Brisbane, Australia
Workshop Chairs:
Patty Kostkova,
City ehealth Research Centre, Institute of Health Sciences, City University,
London, UK
|
Workshop Aims and Objectives
|
|
The objective of this workshop is to provide an informal forum for
researchers from academia, industry and health care institutions to present
their work on semantic resources related to healthcare, to share their
experience and discuss technical interests in order to bridge the gap between
academic ontology research and healthcare project needs. We wish to explore the issues surrounding:
The different kinds of users of a semantic web for Health Care for Life
Sciences/Medicine; what kinds of semantic resources suit each user group and
their needs? Do ontologies make any difference to clinical practice and
patient care? How can we better meet the clinical needs? Are clinicians using
Google, MSN and other search engines to access evidence and how can formal representations
can improve the access to searched knowledge? What level of ontological
formality suit different user and computational needs? The current research and massive financial investments into eHealth in
countries around the world to enable knowledge sharing across geographical
location, instant dissemination of the latest clinical evidence and seamless
integration of the clinical databases with patient electronic records have
shown partial success, however, the full integration at semantic level and
interoperability across organisations and knowledge sources have not yet been
achieved. Formal ontologies, thesauri, classification schemes, etc. will be
essential components that enable this vision as they describe, in various
ways, the entities and knowledge found in Web resources. The domain has
developed such semantic resources as Go, Mesh, Snomed CT, etc. The W3C has
recommended languages and vocabularies such as OWL, RDF, RDFS, and
proposal such as SKOS, etc. as representations for semantic resources, but how do
communities choose a formalism and migrate from one to another? When is it
appropriate to use OWL in its various flavours? What are the costs and
benefits? Do we want formal ontologies or would vocabularies and thesauri do?
When do we need to choose a particular kind of representation? The Semantic Web and health informatics have been technology driven –
is this concept actually meeting the real user needs in a medical domain?
Professionals health informatics organisations are driven from the medical
and clinical needs angle while the W3C’s formation of the HealthCare and Life
Sciences special interest group is a recognition of both the large semantic
activities in the domain as well as the domain’s push for requirements
against the W3C’s recommendations. This workshop will allow some of these
issues to be explored in the medical context. This workshop will investigate
these issues at both formal and real-world level to enable bridging the gap
between formal research and healthcare practise and is of particular
relevance to the international attendees of the MedInfo 2007. Outcome of the Workshop By attracting researchers and decision makers from academia, industry and biomedical and health care institutions, this workshop will be a unique event providing a forum for sharing both technical and medical interests enabling post-workshop collaboration. We aim to provide recommendations to the community as a result of material presented at the workshop and collated for subsequent dissemination.
|
|
Themes of the Workshop
|
|
The workshop will focus on the following themes but is not restricted
to:
|
|
Paper Submission
|
|
Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research results or work-in-progress papers relevant to the workshop call. Submitted papers will be evaluated by the technical committee for originality, significance, technical and medical soundness and clarity of exposition. However, an important evaluation criteria will be relevance to existing healthcare systems and the diversity of authors’ backgrounds allowing a fruitful discussion at the workshop. As the objective of the event is to stir discussion between the academic and healthcare communities, submissions from healthcare practitioners are especially welcomed.
Papers should follow the ACM
format (http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html)
and should be no longer that 6 pages including all graphics,
bibliography and figures. Depending on the quality of the submission, a
Special Issue publication will be negotiated for the best workshop papers.
Submissions should be sent using the http://www.easychair.org/MedSemWeb2007/ online system by 9th July 2007. With any issues please contact the workshop chairs Patty
Kostkova (patty@soi.city.ac.uk)
and Robert Stevens (robert.stevens@manchester.ac.uk)
|
|
Workshop Chairs Contacts
|
|
Dr. Patty Kostkova
Dr. Patty Kostkova is currently a Senior Research Fellow and the head of
the City ehealth Research Centre (CeRC), Institute of Health Sciences, The
City University, London. She leads the development of the National
electronic Library of Infection (NeLI) www.neli.org.uk,
Bugs and Drugs project www.antibioticresistance.org.uk, National Resource of
Infection Control www.nric.org.uk
and the Training In Infection www.trainingininfection.org.uk.
She is a partner on two EU-funded ehealth projects: SeaLife (semantic Web
browser for life sciences) and eBug (disseminating education packs and web
sites for school children across Europe). Her research interests include ehealth, impact evaluation of healthcare Web sites,
Semantic Web, healthcare ontologies and agent-based personalisation. In 2000-2003, as a consultant at WHO HQ she was responsible for the design
and the development of information systems and domain languages enabling a
rapid development of applications for international surveillance and public
health data management, called EpiWin. Currently, she leads the evaluation of
the WHO Resource Center for National Public Health Laboratories. She has published a number of technical reports at international
conferences and journals, a book chapter on adaptive Information Systems and
has recently edited a SI of Health Informatics Journal on Healthcare Digital
Libraries. She is a member of the Specialist Advisory
Committee on Antimicrobial Resistance (SACAR) and was a member of programme committees
of international journals and workshops. She also chaired international
events: the Healthcare Digital Library Workshops (HDL 2003, HDL 2004, HDL
2005) and two Ehealth Workshops at City University in 2002 and 2004. She was an invited speaker and a member of the discussion panel at
First European Workshop on Semantic Web Applications in Biomedicine, Hungary
(2004) and gave invited talks at the Health Canada, Cancer Research, KTL,
Finland, Charles University, Prague, Czech Academy of Science, Health
Protection Agency, NHS Direct Online and the International workshops on
antibiotic resistance organized by ESAC in Brussels (2004) and BCAS, SACAR
& APUA in London (2004). Dr. Robert Stevens Dr.
Robert Stevens is a Senior Lecturer in the bioHealth Informatics Groups at
the University of Manchester. He has been a long-standing promoter of the use
of ontologies within the life sciences community. He has been a co-chair of
the annual bio-ontologies meeting at ISMB, the premier bioinformatics
conference, for the past six years. He has published widely on the use of
ontologies in the life sciences, especially on the use of the Web Ontology
language. He is co-developer of the popular Manchester Pizza tutorial for OWL
and an investigator on the collaborative project that develops the Protégé
OWL plugin with Stanford University. Robert has give many invited talks on
ontologies in life sciences; participated in many panels and sat on numerous
programme committees in the area. Both
workshop chairs are partners on a new EC-funded FP6 project Sealife -
developing a semantic
Web browser for life sciences.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Important Dates
|
|
Submission Date: 9th July 2007 Notification Date: 23rd July 2007 Camera Ready Date: 30th July 2007 Workshop Date: 19th August 2007 For more information, please contact Patty (patty@soi.city.ac.uk) and/or Robert (robert.stevens@manchester.ac.uk) Looking forward to your submissions J
|