CFP: The 3rd International Workshop on Quality Assurance and Enrichment of Biological and Biomedical Ontologies and Terminologies (QABBO 2021)

Online CFP: 
https://sites.google.com/manhattan.edu/bibm2021

Submission Deadline: October 25, 2021

The 3rd International Workshop on Quality Assurance and Enrichment of Biological and Biomedical Ontologies and Terminologies (https://sites.google.com/manhattan.edu/bibm2021) will be held virtually in conjunction with IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (http://ieeebibm.org/BIBM2021/) in December 9-12, 2021. We are now inviting original research submissions (full paper up to 8 pages). 

Selected articles will be invited to submit an extended version to be published after the review process in a special journal issue of BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making.

Overview:
    Ontologies and terminologies provide structured and unambiguous ways of representing domain information in biology and biomedicine. Examples of biological and biomedical ontologies and terminologies include SNOMED CT, Gene Ontology, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest, Foundational Model of Anatomy, and Logical Observation Identifier Names and Codes. They have served as knowledge sources for a wide range of biomedical applications including data integration and exchange, natural language processing, and decision support and reasoning. 

    These ontologies and terminologies tend to be large and regularly maintained through revisions and modifications in their lifecycle which may result in ambiguity, redundancy and modeling inconsistencies. As such, quality assurance and enrichment of these ontologies and terminologies become important as they impact all the downstream applications that rely on them, and they may be used in applications that can affect patient-care such as in electronic health records and in clinical decision support systems.

    The goal of this workshop is to bring together data analysts and researchers in the field of Bioinformatics, Biomedicine and Healthcare Informatics to discuss the role, importance, approaches and methods for quality assurance and enrichment of biological and biomedical ontologies and terminologies.

Scope:
    The topics of this workshop include but are not limited to the following:
    - Methodologies for efficient and effective quality assurance of ontologies and terminologies
    - Algorithms for identifying errors or problematic areas within the ontologies and terminologies
    - Development and enrichment of ontologies and terminologies
    - Methods and/or tools to evaluate the quality of ontologies and terminologies
    - Review of existing methods of quality assurance of ontologies and terminologies
    - Assessment and/or usage of ontologies and terminologies in clinical trials
    - Leveraging machine learning and natural language processing in quality assurance of ontologies and terminologies
    - Applications that can assist in the quality assurance of ontologies and terminologies such as utilizing crowdsourcing methods or using visualization
    - Methods and/or tools to improve the quality of ontology matching or alignment

Timeline:
    Oct 25, 2021: Due date for workshop paper submission
    Nov 10, 2021: Notification of paper acceptance to authors
    Nov 15, 2021: Camera-ready copies of accepted papers
    Dec 9-12, 2021: Workshop

Organizing Committee:
    Ankur Agrawal, PhD, Manhattan College
    Licong Cui, PhD, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth)

Program Committee:
    Duo Wei, Stockton University
    Hao Liu, Columbia University
    Huanying (Helen) Gu, New York Institute of Technology
    Ling Zheng, Monmouth University
    Muhammad Amith, UTHealth
    Paul Morrey, Utah Valley University
    Vipina K. Keloth, UTHealth
    Zhe He, Florida State University

Submission:
    Please submit a full-length paper (upto 8 pages IEEE 2-column format) through the online submission system for Workshops available at https://wi-lab.com/cyberchair/2021/bibm21/scripts/submit.php?subarea=S02&undisplay_detail=1&wh=/cyberchair/2021/bibm21/scripts/ws_submit.php
    You can also find the format instructions by following the previous link.

Review Process:
    All papers will be reviewed by at least two reviewers. Reviewers will include the program committee members, other experts from the field as well as the contributing authors. 

Registration:
    At least one author of an accepted paper needs to register in order to have the paper published in the proceedings. Registration information is available at https://ieeebibm.org/BIBM2021/

Journal Special Issue Invitation:
    Selected articles will be invited to submit an extended version to be published after the review process in a special journal issue of BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making.

Contact:
    Ankur Agrawal (ankur@manhattan.edu)
    Licong Cui (licong.cui@uth.tmc.edu)