Welcome to the Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on
Semantic Web Applications and Tools for the Life Sciences
(SWAT4LS 2018)

Preface
It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the Proceedings of the 11th International Conference
on Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Life Sciences (SWAT4LS 2018). SWAT4LS is an
international conference that serves as a venue to present high-quality research from all fields
of Semantic Data Science and Web technologies in Health Care and Life Sciences.
The objectives of the SWAT4LS conference are to provide a forum dedicated to the
dissemination of original research, discussion of practical insights, and the reporting of
experiences relating to the adoption of Semantic technologies applied in biomedical informatics
and computational biology. The conference also offers a forum to exchange emerging and
thought-provoking ideas through poster and demo presentations.
SWAT4LS 2018 was held at Elzenveld, a historic building that has previously served as hospital
and monastery, on December 3-6, 2018, Antwerp, Belgium.
The call for papers solicited research contributions broadly in the area of in the area of
knowledge representation in life sciences, drug discovery, medicine, health, and agriculture,
with a central focus on biomedical ontologies, rules and standards for information exchange and
interoperability.
The call for contributions attracted 59 submissions from around the globe. The technical
program consists of 14 full papers, 2 short papers, 19 posters, 8 demo presentations, and 4
industrial talks. These were complemented by 4 keynote talks, 12 tutorials and full hackathon
day.
The SWAT4LS 2018 organizers wish to thank the program committee for giving their time and
sharing their expertise. Their rigorous evaluations, constructive criticisms and attention to detail
helped us arrive at a high-quality program. We thank all researchers that responded to the call
for papers by submitting manuscripts for evaluation. We thank the tutorial presenters for
detailed technical presentations reviewing contemporary Semantic technologies in use today.
We are grateful to the excellent keynote speakers who to contributed stimulating and inspiring
talks. We recognised also the generous support of our 2018 sponsors GODAN and Figshare.

Antwerp, Belgium, December 2018
Christopher J. O. Baker, Andrea Splendiani, Andra Waagmeester, and Oya Deniz Beyan