Welcome to WWW10!

On behalf of the organizing committee and program committee of WWW10, we would like to welcome all of you to Hong Kong, the city where East meets West, where modernization integrates tradition, and where days and nights are equally lively, colorful, and exciting. This is also the first time this major Web arena has been held in Asia.

The Tenth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW10) is part of the International World Wide Web Conference Series, run by the IW3C21 (see https://www.iw3c2.org/). It begins with a day of Tutorials and Workshops, followed by three days of the core conference, and ends with a final day of specialist tracks called Developers' Day. The core conference includes the Refereed Paper Track, where the papers in this volume are presented. This year, the other core day tracks are the W3C track, Web and Education Track, Keynote Speeches, Posters Track, Panels, Culture Track, Exhibits, Vendors Track, E-Commerce on the Web Track, Web and Society Track, and Internationalization Track. We are particularly proud of the traditional W3C Track, where staff members of W3C update the Web community on what they've accomplished over the last year, and on what directions they're taking in their future work. The Web and Education Track is the seventh annual symposium (SYM7) of the Hong Kong Web Symposium Consortium. The Consortium draws its members primarily from education, with a small number of them working in IT-related occupations and IT-savvy government departments and community organizations.

The lure of Hong Kong and the great work our program committee did in getting the Call For Papers out increased the number of submissions to the Refereed Paper Track substantially. We had 392 submissions, up from 282 submitted to WWW9. We accepted 78 papers, giving us a 19.9% acceptance rate, down slightly from the 20.2% acceptance rate of last year. Some of the papers not accepted to the Refereed Paper Track yet containing interesting new work were accepted to the Posters, the Web and Society, or the Internationalization tracks. The 257 authors of the accepted refereed papers come from 6 continents and 20 countries, making WWW10 a truly international conference. 146 of the authors are from academia; 111 are from industry. The distribution of authors among continents is:

Africa 3 Asia 32
South America 4 Europe 61
Australia 6 North America 151

The tremendous task of getting high quality reviews for the wide diversity of papers submitted to WWW10 is accomplished by breaking the Refereed Paper Track down into 12 areas. Each of those areas has a Vice Chair and a Deputy Vice Chair, who are responsible for forming their own International Program Committee (IPC) to obtain the reviews of the papers assigned to their area. The number of review areas was increased substantially this year (from eight at WWW9). We brought back two review areas from previous years and experimented with cross-over reviews with some of our specialty tracks. Searching, Query, and Indexing (from WWW8) was a huge success, with far and away the largest number of submissions requesting this area. Mobile Agents and Wireless Access had been pulled after WWW7 because of the small number of submissions it attracted. This year it was as strong an area as any other. Both the Web and Education and the Culture tracks accepted and reviewed paper submissions to their tracks, sharing the process and standards set in the Refereed Paper Track. This co-branding enables the best submissions of alternate tracks to be judged in comparison with the best refereed papers, and to be published along with them.

Each submitted paper was assigned to a review area within the Refereed Paper Track, and reviewed by at least 3 International Program Committee members. This produced a total of 1259 reviews. You can see the large number of people who contributed to this effort by looking at the Program Committee Vice Chairs and Program Committee Members lists in the Conference Committee section of this proceedings and the conference website <http://www10.org.hk/>. The final decision on all the papers was made at a two-day Program Committee meeting, held this year in January in Boston. The Program Chairs, Vice Chairs, and Track Chairs participated.

A number of other activities occurred at the Program Committee meeting. The Awards Chair discussed what awards were planned for WWW10. The awards, one of which will be the Best Paper Award, will be presented during the closing ceremony, and will be posted on the conference website. The areas' Vice Chairs selected their area highlight papers. The Best Paper Award will be presented to one of these papers. The Selected Area Highlights are:

Two student paper awards were also selected by the Program Committee:

All of the people listed on the Conference Committee pages have contributed much hard work to the success of WWW10. Please take a minute to look over that list. We would personally like to thank Yammie Yuen of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Fritz Chiu of Hong Kong Productivity Council for their volunteer work facilitating the WWW10 program development before the Professional Conference Organizer (PCO) was appointed. We would also like to thank the people who made the Refereed Paper Track and the production of this issue of the proceedings possible. The Refereed Paper Track relies on the participation of all the authors who submitted papers. The Vice Chairs (all twenty two of them) put in a huge amount of organizational effort, and their IPCs and reviewers provided the intelligent and thoughtful reviews necessary to produce the best Refereed Paper Track possible. In addition, Irwin King of the Chinese University of Hong Kong provided invaluable support during the program committee meeting.

For the third year in a row, this conference series has used the Witan Web referee system <http://witanweb.iit.nrc.ca/> from the National Research Council's (NRC's) Institute for Information Technology. We thank Stephen Mackay of NRC for his tremendous help running the system for the WWW10 Refereed Paper Track and Poster Track. Angus Siu and Gary Shek of the Chinese University of Hong Kong offered their professional help in designing and maintaining the WWW10 Web page, in checking the format of submitted papers, in sending out notifications, and in preparing the Web version of this proceedings. Mark Mandelbaum of ACM and Lisa Tolles-Efinger of Sheridan Printing put in the effort to produce the proceedings you now hold in your hands. Barbara Fuller of Foretec organized the paper-based Call For Papers and program committee meeting. Eric Tang of Foretec provided the initial web-based Call For Papers and our initial Web site design. Mary Ellen would like to thank Iris Associates which provided a supportive organizational context for much of her work as Program co-Chair. Finally, as with all large endeavors run on volunteer labor, each of the conference organizers had a personal support system of loved ones and friends who contributed and sacrificed to make WWW10 possible. A very big thank-you to all of them.

We hope you are able to take advantage the result of all our labors. The breadth of offerings at WWW10 is our largest ever. We encourage you to try something new, both during the conference, and outside of the conference in Hong Kong itself!

 

Vincent Y Shen, WWW10 General Co-Chair
Nobuo Saito, WWW10 General Co-Chair
Michael R. Lyu, WWW10 Program Co-Chair
Mary Ellen Zurko, WWW10 Program Co-Chair

 

1 The IW3C2 is always interested in Expressions of Interest or full proposals to host future conferences. See <http://www.iw3c2.org/Hosting/Welcome.html> or contact iw3c2@cern.ch for further information.