Call for papers: "E-Health Systems and Semantic Web"

For a special issue of the International Journal of Big Data Intelligence.

E-health systems play a significant role in the well-being of individuals, both as medical solutions and for healthcare towards everyday well-being. New models and methods continue to be developed to produce safer healthcare environments. The rapid growth of using such devices and technologies in medical fields has generated new opportunities for emerging application improvement; however, huge challenges still need to be addressed in order to develop consistent, suitable, safe, flexible and power-efficient systems fit for medical needs.

Semantic web technologies render dynamic, heterogeneous, distributed, shared content equally accessible to human reader and software agents. This special issue aims to contribute to the vision of achieving a synergy with multi-agent technologies, whereby both semantics and agents will centre stage. Its goal is to garner the synergy of both technologies by taking up both the semantic web and the agent aspects of the common research issue in relation to e-health systems.

This special issue has the following complementary objectives:

• Inquiring into the theory and practice of engineering semantic e-health systems, especially methods, means and best cases;
• Exploring unifying software engineering methodologies employed in implementing semantic applications across domains; and
• Deploying new technologies in the fields of semantic intelligence, e-health systems, m-health systems and applications, especially for distributed healthcare systems.

Recent developments in big data, wearable sensors and mobile and semantic technologies are significantly impacting the daily lives of people through people-centric systems extending human capabilities in obtaining, consuming and sharing personal information. Consequently, a flock of issues both beneficial and threatening await attention. Therefore the topics of interest (see below) span both theory and practice in big data, analytics, semantics and agents for e-health systems.

The issue will carry revised and substantially extended versions of selected papers presented at the 2015 IEEE International Workshop on Engineering Semantic Agent Systems (ESAS 2015), but we also strongly encourage researchers unable to participate in the conference to submit articles for this call.

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Smart e-health systems through web technologies
• Autonomic analysis, monitoring and situation alertness
• Body sensor networks and wearable sensor systems in e-health
• Medical biofeedback
• Medical decision support systems and tools
• Context awareness and autonomous computing for ambient assisted living
• E-health-oriented software architectures (agent, SOA, middleware, etc.)
• E-health virtual and augmented reality
• Emerging e-health applications
• Health grid and health cloud
• Health monitoring and traffic classification
• Healthcare management systems
• ICT-enabled personal health systems
• Image and video processing in e-health
• E-health devices and smart parts for healthcare systems
• E-health big data: access, aggregation and use
• Semantic web rule languages and e-health systems
• Ontology engineering and inference in e-health systems
• Semantic processing in e-health
• Case studies

Important Dates
Submission deadline: 15 October, 2015
Completion of first-round reviews: 15 December, 2015
Revised papers: 1 February, 2016
Final papers due: 1 March, 2016