Aims and scope

Journal of Biomedical Semantics addresses issues of semantic enrichment and semantic processing in the biomedical and clinical domain. The scope of the journal covers two main areas:

Infrastructure for biomedical semantics: focusing on semantic resources and repositories, ontology design, meta-data standards and management, resource description, knowledge representation and semantic frameworks, the Biomedical Semantic Web, and semantic interoperability.

Semantic mining, annotation, and analysis: focusing on approaches and applications of semantic resources; and tools for investigation, reasoning, prediction, artificial intelligence modelling, and discoveries in biomedicine.

The Journal of Biomedical Semantics operates a mandatory research data sharing policy and as such requires that all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely be available to reviewers and readers. Authors must deposit their datasets in publicly available repositories prior to peer review, or include them as supplementary information files with their manuscript. The data will be assessed and reviewed as part of the journal’s standard peer-review process and, if necessary, revisions suggested.

Research data includes a wide range of types, including spreadsheets, images, textual extracts, archival documents, video or audio, interview notes or any specialist formats generated during research.

Special Issue on Semantic Technologies in Healthcare and Life Sciences
截稿日期: 2026-10-12

This collection focuses on the application of semantic web-based technologies for knowledge representation and data integration in life sciences in the broadest sense, i.e. healthcare, biology, agriculture and biodiversity, aiming to advance biodiversity, biomedical research and healthcare practice. It originates from research presented at SWAT4HCLS (Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Healthcare and Life Sciences), the annual European conference that evolved from the original SWAT4LS series. SWAT4HCLS provides a dedicated venue for critical discussions on the challenges, opportunities, and innovations in adopting semantic web technologies in healthcare and life sciences.

The emergence of the Web as the primary communication medium, the rapidly growing volume of biomedical data, and the convergence of disciplines across the biomedical spectrum highlight the Web as a promising platform to enhance the efficiency of research and healthcare delivery. At the same time, these developments underscore the need for semantic approaches to meaningfully integrate information arising from diverse processes and disciplines.

SWAT4HCLS sits at this intersection of Web and semantic technologies, showcasing a frontier of innovation where approaches such as Semantic Web and Linked Data solutions are proposed and critically evaluated. The objective of this thematic series, and of SWAT4HCLS itself, is to explore this frontier—both through the critical assessment of current technologies and the presentation of novel methods. The series welcomes submissions that contribute to these goals.

Please note, this is an invitation-only collection. 

https://link.springer.com/collections/fhajdigahi