Medical Ontologies

Dear Colleagues,

A Special Issue on “Medical Ontologies”, in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, is being organized. The journal has a 2019 JCR Impact Factor of 2.849 and a 5-year impact Factor of 3.127, being of quartile 1 or 2 depending on the domain. For detailed information on the journal, please refer to the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph.

An ontology is defined as a common and explicit representation of a conceptualization. Its purpose is to represent consensual knowledge in a way that is shareable, comprehensible, interconnected, and, if possible, allows for inferences. Ontologies may take different forms and may represent knowledge at different levels of abstraction: from general ontologies, such as the Cyc ontology or the Schema.org (https://schema.org), to domain ontologies, such as Snomed CT (http://www.snomed.org) or Gene Ontology (http://geneontology.org) in the medical field.

Apart from the semantic web, the medical domain is where ontologies have possibly been used more extensively and with higher success. In the medical domain, they have provided the means to represent, share, and reuse medical information over the last two decades; The Bioportal repository (https://bioportal.bioontology.org) is a clear example of that, with almost 900 accessible biomedical ontologies. Furthermore, ontologies provide the grounds for knowledge discovery and novel systems for solving multiple problems such as natural language processing, query answering, content alignment, and disease prediction.

The goal of this Special Issue is to provide a space to share the state of the art and ongoing work related to ontologies in the medical field. Hence the Special Issue will accept works that address any aspect of the medical ontology lifecycle: analysis and design, implementation, alignment, population, validation, and use in real environments. We hope the Special Issue will collect and consolidate novel and high-quality research contributions on the conception, implementation, validation, visualization and use of ontology in the medical domain that will provide the ground for new and more advanced knowledge-based applications.

The following types of papers will be considered:

• Research papers: analytical papers of new research;
• Case studies: real-world applications, evaluation of industrial solutions, and lessons learned in putting solutions into practice;
• Reviews, surveys, and tutorials: analysis of the state of the art.

Prof. Dr. Jordi Conesa
Dr. Laia Subirats
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Ontological reasoning considering medical information, time, space, and/or social connections
• Use of ontologies in clinical decision support systems
• Ontologies in health-related citizen science experiences
• Ontological engineering
• Ontology alignment
• Ontology population
• Knowledge representation
• Real-world ontology-based applications
• Ontology-based approaches in big data contexts
• Ontology-based approaches for deep learning
• Ontologies usage in natural language processing
• Sensor-based semantic systems
• Ontologies for image recognition
• Quality assurance of ontologies
• Privacy in ontologies
• Visualization of ontologies
• COVID-19 ontology-based systems