Call for Papers SWAT4HCLS 2027

[Andrea Splendiani]

Apologies for cross-posting.

We are pleased to announce the Call for Contributions to the coming edition of the Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Healthcare and Life Sciences Conference - SWAT4HCLS 2027. SWAT4HCLS 2027 will be hosted by the Swiss Bioinformatics Institute in Basel, from 01. to 04.Feb.2027. 

Please contact us if you have any questions at “swat4hcls AT gmail dot com”.

Kind regards,

on behalf of the SWAT4HCLS Organizing Committee.

Call for Papers SWAT4HCLS 2027

We warmly invite you to submit your recent work to the 2027 edition of the Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Health Care and Life Sciences conference (SWAT4HCLS 2027) which will be held in Basel, Switzerland from the 01. to 04.Feb.2027.  

SWAT4HCLS will publish work in the form of papers, posters, and demonstrations on original research, data, semantic models, and application experiences. As a guide, please consider the topics of interest. 

Topics of interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

Using semantic and web technologies for Health Care and Life Sciences

• Examples and recent advances from bioimaging, agriculture, food science, biodiversity, molecular biology, translational and personalised medicine, drug development, clinical trials, RWE and healthcare, specific diseases (rare, undiagnosed, infectious, oncology).

• Examples of querying, validation, visualisation, federated analysis, artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics, knowledge graphs, using FAIR data, use of personal health data, clinical intelligence from electronic health records.

• Graph-based applications of LLM RAG in HCLS

• SPARQL query and data model editing support tools with LLMs

• Demonstrations of repurposing tools, including previously published Semantic Web tools.

• Demonstration of trans-disciplinary collaboration and citizen science.

Semantic web methods and tools for Healthcare and Life Sciences

• Explainable AI, neural symbolic reasoning, knowledge-driven machine learning and data mining, Large Language Models, NLP and text mining.

• Interoperability of knowledge representation (e.g. GBIF, OMOP, FHIR, GA4GH, OBO foundry, mapping standards), ontologies, rules.

• Data stewardship, provenance, trust and reproducibility, sustainability, adoption (including failures!), data publishing.

• FAIR-based federated architecture, semantic workflow technologies, person-centric and privacy preserving infrastructure. 

Types of Submission

The following types of submissions for SWAT4HCLS 2027 are invited:

Long papers (between 10 and 12 pages plus references): 

• Research papers – Original research on a topic of interest to the SWAT4HCLS audience.

• In-use papers – Data and/or application/tool descriptions addressing a topic of interest to the SWAT4HCLS audience.

Short papers (up to 5 pages plus references):

• Position papers, application notes, discovery notes, use-cases of Semantic Web applications and tools.

Posters and Demonstrations (up to 2 pages plus references):

• Ongoing work, exciting preliminary results, updates to “in-use” data and applications/tools.

• Working demonstrations of new, revived or updated tools (even if previously published). 

• Any long or short paper rejected which is within the scope of the conference will be immediately considered as a poster/demo submission.

Tutorials (up to 5 pages):

• Tutorial proposals must include title, acronym (if applicable), abstract, responsible tutors and/or facilitators (including affiliation), audience and required skills, links to previous versions of this tutorial (if applicable), maximum number of participants, preferred duration (tutorials will run for half a day, 3-4 hours, including coffee break).

• Please be aware that at least one facilitator must attend on-site.

Important Dates (AOE Timezone):

Submissions

• Call for contributions announced: 16.June.2026

• Submission system open: 07.July.2026 (link will be announced soon, as in previous years we will use Oxford Abstracts)

• Abstract submission (optional but very appreciated): 07.Sep.2026

• Tutorial submission: 07.Sep.2026

• Paper, poster, demo submission: 14.Sep.2026

Notifications

• Tutorial acceptance notification: 05.Oct.2026

• Paper, poster, demo acceptance notification: 23.Nov.2026

Camera-ready

• Paper, poster, demo camera-ready version: 14.Dec.2026

Conference

• 01. to 04.Feb.2027: Tutorial day, conference and hackathon

For some common questions, please keep an eye at our FAQ page

Instructions for Authors

Accepted submissions will be part of the proceedings of the CEUR conference proceedings and will be publicly available under CC-by 4.0 license. 

• All submissions must be in English and submitted as a  PDF using the one-column variant of CEURART style. 

• Contributions will be peer-reviewed by at least three members of the Scientific Program Committee.

• Poster and demo submissions will be published in PUBLISSO FRL under CC-by and will get its own DOI

• Proceedings publication will be announced soon

• All accepted contributions will be invited to submit an extended version to the SWAT4HCLS 2027 special issue/collection in the Journal of Biomedical Semantics