WALS 2022
The 1st International Workshop
on Web Applications for Life Sciences

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WALS 2022

OVERVIEW

The recent advances in unraveling the secrets of human conditions and diseases have encouraged new paradigms for their diagnosis and treatment. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has attracted increasing attention toward the genetic mechanisms of viruses and infected hosts. The information related to these phenomena is increasing at unprecedented rates, directly impacting the design and development of data management pipelines and their applications. New ways of processing and exposing data and knowledge on the Web in healthcare and life sciences environments are thus strongly needed.

The WALS workshop aims at being an initial meeting forum for Web Engineering, Data Management, and Bioinformatics researchers working on life sciences problems, offering the opportunity to share, discuss and find new approaches to support Search, Knowledge Extraction, and Data Science on the Web, thereby achieving important results for healthcare, precision medicine, biology, genomics, and virology.

The workshop welcomes submissions of fresh investigations and demonstrations concerning conceptual, experimental, and applied studies of life sciences problems on the Web. Directions of particular interest include:

1) monitoring and adaptation of Web Engineering techniques for life sciences;

2) design and engineering of Web applications for resolving life sciences problems;

3) development of crowdsourcing and collaborative strategies for life sciences data curation, integration, and discovery.


TOPICS OF INTEREST

The workshop focuses on Web Engineering as a means for facing the challenges that emerge when designing and developing applications for life sciences, focused on several branches such as healthcare, precision medicine, molecular biology, genomics, and virology. The workshop is not restricted to particular research methods, and we will consider conceptual, empirical, and applied research (including practical demonstrations). The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Web applications modeling and engineering for genomics
  • Web applications for the management of electronic/digital health records (EHR)
  • Web user interfaces for genomics, virology, or molecular biology
  • Development of Web systems for Precision Medicine
  • Web services for exploration of life sciences databases and knowledge graphs
  • Biological knowledge extraction
  • Genomic big data analytics
  • Web crowdsourcing methods for life sciences data curation and annotation
  • Information visualization and exploratory analysis methods for biology
  • Data science applications to healthcare and biology on the Web
  • Semantic Web knowledge representation for genomics
  • Life sciences Semantic Web applications
  • Biomedical ontologies engineering
  • Interoperability of health information systems and databases on the Web
  • Web Engineering techniques for FAIRification of biological datasets
  • COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 tracking via Web applications

PAPER SUBMISSION

We invite submissions of high quality papers describing original and unpublished results regarding any of the workshop’s topics of interest.

Accepted papers will be included in the post-workshop proceedings to appear in Springer’s series. The authors must submit manuscripts using the Springer-Verlag LNCS style for Lecture Notes in Computer Science. For style files and details, see the page http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. The workshop will accept two types of contributions:

  • Full papers – maximum 12 pages including references
  • Short/demo papers – maximum 6 pages including references

Papers must be submitted as PDF files using EasyChair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wals2022.

To ensure high quality, all papers will be thoroughly peer reviewed by the Program Committee. Manuscripts not submitted in the LNCS style or having more than 12 pages will be automatically rejected. The papers need to be original and not submitted or accepted for publication in any other workshop, conference, or journal.

For each accepted paper, at least one author must attend the workshop and present the paper. Registration is subject to the terms and conditions of ICWE.

Contact: anna.bernasconi@polimi.it

IMPORTANT DATES

  • Submission deadline: April 24, 2022 
  • Notification of acceptance:  May 31, 2022
  • Workshop day:  July 8, 2022
  • Camera-ready: July 29, 2022
WORKSHOP WEBSITE