The 2nd International Workshop
on Web Applications for Life Sciences

Logo WALS

6-9th June, 2023 in Alicante, Spain


In conjunction with the 23rd International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2023) - 6-9th June

About

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:

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 guidelines

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, as per the usual tradition of the ICWE conference joint events (see last year's ICWE 2022 Workshops).

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.

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.

Main contact: algarsi3@pros.upv.es

Important dates (AoE)

  • Paper submission deadline: April 14th, 2023
  • Notification deadline: May 5th, 2023
  • Article revision deadline: May 15th, 2023
  • Conference days: June 6-9th, 2023
  • Camera-ready deadline: July 9th

Registration

Please refer to the main conference website
Details TBD.

Organizers

annabernasconi
Anna Bernasconi
Department of Electronics, Information, and Bioengineering - Politecnico di Milano, Italy
anna.bernasconi@polimi.it

Anna Bernasconi is a Research Fellow in the Department of Electronics, Information, and Bioengineering also at Politecnico di Milano. Her research focuses on conceptual modeling, data integration, semantic web, and biological data analysis. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, her research has moved to viral genomics, by building models, databases, and Web search systems for viral sequences and their variants. She co-organized and chaired the first three International Workshops on Conceptual Modeling for Life Sciences (CMLS 2020 / 2021 / 2022) co-located with the ER conference and co-organized the First International Workshop on Web Applications for Life Sciences (WALS 2022) co-located with the ICWE conference.

albertogarcia
Alberto García S.
Valencian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Spain.
algarsi3@pros.upv.es

Alberto García S. obtained his Ph.D. cum laude at Universitat Politecnica de Valencia under the supervision of Prof. Oscar Pastor. He is currently a researcher at the VRAIN research institute, where he focuses on conceptual modeling, data science, and User Interface design. He has participated in multiple research projects in collaboration with clinicians and geneticists to generate knowledge from genomics data effectively and efficiently.

pietropinoli
Pietro Pinoli
Department of Electronics, Information, and Bioengineering - Politecnico di Milano, Italy
pietro.pinoli@polimi.it

Pietro Pinoli works as Research Fellow and lecturer at the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering at the Politecnico di Milano (Italy). He received his PhD cum laude in 2017, with a thesis titled “Modeling and Querying Genomic Data” where he proposed and benchmarked data structures and algorithms to manage, search and elaborate huge collections of genomic datasets, by means of cloud and distributed technologies. He has been visiting PhD candidate at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA, US). His research interests include bioinformatics and computational biology, data bases and data management, big data technology and algorithms, machine learning and natural language processing, and drug repurposing.



Program Committee (to be confirmed)

  • Giuseppe Agapito, Università Magna Graecia Catanzaro
  • José Alberto Benítez-Andrades, University of León
  • Stefano Ceri, Polytechnic University of Milan
  • Pietro Cinaglia, University Magna Graecia of Catanzaro
  • Tommaso Dolci, Politecnico di Milano
  • Jose Luis Garrido, University of Granada
  • Giancarlo Guizzardi, University of Twente
  • Ana León Palacio, Universitat Politècnica de València
  • Sergio Lifschitz, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
  • Giovanni Meroni, Technical University of Denmark
  • Ignacio Panach, University of Valencia
  • Oscar Pastor, Universitat Politècnica de València
  • Rosario Michael Piro, Polytechnic University of Milan

Program

TBD