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

In conjunction with the 22nd International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2022)
in Bari, Italy - July 5-8, 2022
***Hybrid workshop (in-person/virtual)***


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Conference website
http://www.bioinformatics.deib.polimi.it/wals2022/

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Submission link
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wals2022

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Submission deadline: May 5th, 2022 (EXTENDED!)



******Workshop focus******

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 humans.
The information related to these phenomena is increasing at unprecedented rates, directly impacting the design and development of data management pipelines and of the applications based on them. 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, or 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 the solution of life sciences problems; 3) development of crowdsourcing and collaborative strategies of 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:

- 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

******Proceedings******

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.

******Post-conference publication******

We are working toward a preliminary agreement with BMC Bioinformatics journal (2-year IF 2.511, SJR 1.374) for a post-conference supplement related to Web Applications in Life Sciences. High quality papers accepted to our workshop will be invited to submit a revised and extended version to the journal supplement.

******Important Dates******

Paper submission: May 5th, 2022 (EXTENDED!)
Notification: May 31st, 2022
Workshop day: July 8th
Camera-ready version: July 29th, 2022

******Organizing Committee******

Anna Bernasconi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Giuseppe Agapito, Universita' degli Studi "Magna Græcia" di Catanzaro, Italy
Luca Nanni, Université de Lausanne
Pietro Pinoli, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Contact: anna.bernasconi@polimi.it