******WALS 2023: The 2nd International Workshop on Web Applications for Life Sciences ******

In conjunction with the 23rd International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2023) in Alicante, Spain - June 6-9, 2023 (in-person conference)

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Conference website
http://www.bioinformatics.deib.polimi.it/wals2023/

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Submission link
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wals2023

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Submission deadline: April 21st, 2023

******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 recent pandemics have brought 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, at its second edition, aims at being a 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:

- 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

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

ICWE 2023 proceedings will be part of the ICWE 2023 Workshop volume published in Springer 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 https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines.

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=wals2023.

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

Paper submission: April 21st, 2023
Notification: May 5th, 2023
Article revision deadline: May 15th, 2023
ICWE Conference dates: June 6-9th, 2023
Camera-ready version and copyright form: July 9th, 2023

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

Anna Bernasconi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Alberto García S., Universitat Politècnica de València
Pietro Pinoli, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Main contact: algarsi3@pros.upv.es