The Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference 20-24 May 2003, Budapest, HUNGARY

Programme Co-Chairs’ Message

On behalf of the Programme Committee, we are pleased to welcome you to WWW2003 in Budapest, one of the most beautiful capitals in the world. We received a record number of 602 submissions to the refereed papers track this year, a 33% increase over the previous record. We accepted 77 papers (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. As a result, we had to regretfully decline many good papers. All papers were rigorously reviewed by the technical programme 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: We added the Web Engineering area, which received 75 submissions, due to its success as an alternate track in the previous year. Electronic Commerce and Security were split into two tracks this year. The Search and Data Mining area received the most submissions with 137, followed by the Semantic Web area with 98 submissions.

There are also a number of papers being presented in alternate tracks which are being published separately from the main proceedings. This year, we accepted 38 papers out of 103 paper submissions in the alternate tracks (not counting invited papers), with an acceptance rate of 36.9%. Altogether, we received 705 paper submissions for both the refereed papers track and alternate tracks this year.

Many people contributed to the success of the programme. We would like to thank the entire WWW2003 programme committee for their exceptional work and dedication in the review process. We also thank our Hungarian team members, especially Viktor Richter and Tamas Kezdi, for their outstanding logistical support throughout the entire process. It’s our sincere hope that the World Wide Web conference series will continue to provide an excellent forum for researchers and practitioners of the World Wide Web community to exchange ideas and to help grow this community together.

WWW2003 Refereed Papers Track Proceedings

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