WWW2003 - The Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference in Hungary

by László Kovács

The Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference took place in Budapest, Hungary, 20-24 May 2003, organized by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2) and SZTAKI.

Beginning with the first International WWW Conference in 1994, this prestigious series of the International World Wide Web Conference Committee also provides a public forum for the WWW Consortium (W3C) through the annual W3C track.

The conference with more than 800 attendees from 57 countries started with a day of tutorials and workshops and followed by a three-day technical programme. The fifth day was a 'Developers Day.' The tutorials and workshops provided in-depth looks at specific areas of current interest. The technical programme included refereed paper presentations, alternate track presentations, plenary sessions, panels and poster sessions. Developers Day was devoted to in-depth technical sessions designed specifically for Web developers.

The W3C presented three days of presentations on the Web, future Web browsers, W3C architectural principles, the XML family, Web services, the Semantic Web, new devices, and horizontal essentials.
A number of 602 submissions was received to the refereed papers track this year, a 33% increase over the previous record. 77 papers were accepted (compared to 72 in the previous year) for the proceedings and presentation at the conference, an acceptance rate of 12,8% which makes this World Wide Web conference the most competitive ever. All papers were rigorously reviewed by the technical program committee, which was divided into the following twelve areas:

Applications
Browsers and User Interfaces
Electronic Commerce
Hypermedia
Languages
Mobility and Wireless Access
Multimedia
Performance and Reliability
Search and Data Mining
Security and Privacy
Semantic Web
Web Engineering

Several changes were made in the area lineup this year: Web Engineering as a new area, and the Electronic Commerce and Security were split into two tracks, Search and Data Mining, and Semantic Web.
One of the main points of the conference was the harmonic symbiosis of the Web Services and Semantic Web in a longer run.

The Conference Co-Chairs were Gusztáv Hencsey (SZTAKI) and Bebo White (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), and the Programme Committee Co-Chairs were Yih-Farn Robin Chen (AT&T Labs - Research), László Kovács (SZTAKI) and Steve Lawrence (Google, Inc.). The main sponsoring institutions of the event were Ministry of Informatics and Communications, Hungarian National Tourist Office, IBM Research, Alvarion, AT&T Labs, ERCIM, W3C, NIIF and VOA News, and the conference partners were International Federation for Information Processing and W3C.

Links:
WWW2003: http://www2003.org/
IW3C2: http://www.iw3c2.org/

Please contact:
László Kovács, SZTAKI
Tel: +36 1 279 6212
E-mail: laszlo.kovacs@sztaki.hu