General Co-Chairs: Introduction to the WWW2006 Conference

On behalf of the entire organizing committee, we welcome you to Edinburgh and WWW2006. This is the 15th conference in a series that was started in Geneva in 1994 and has subsequently been held in locations all over the world. WWW2006 is the first conference in the series to be held in the United Kingdom. This year's conference has made a number of structural innovations over previous conferences including integrating both the developer track and tutorials with the main conference program instead of holding them on separate days. There are two days of workshops compared with one day at previous conferences. The rich content provided over the five days of the conference includes the latest research laying the groundwork for the future of the Web, the latest technology for Web developers, and presentations and discussions on how the Web is affecting industry, education, government, and society in general.

The conference includes a wide variety of technical presentations, panel discussions, tutorials, and keynote addresses. We have many very distinguished speakers including Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, and the event is opened by Jack McConnell (First Minister of Scotland).

We would like to thank all the conference sponsors, in particular the University of Southampton, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the British Computer Society. We would also like to thank the many volunteers who devoted countless hours to help organize the conference. Finally, we would like to thank all of the conference attendees; it is you who really make the WWW series the special events that they are. We hope that you find WWW2006 to be the best conference yet in the series.

Leslie Carr,
University of Southampton, UK

David De Roure,
University of Southampton, UK

Arun Iyengar,
IBM Research, USA