A Call for Participation has been issued in connection with The Thirteenth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2004), to be held May 17-22, 2004 at the New York Sheraton, New York, NY, USA. WWW 2004 is hosted by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in partnership with the IFIP Working Group 6.4 on Internet Applications Engineering and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The Program Committee Co-Chairs include Marc Najork (Microsoft Research) and Craig Wills (Worcester Polytechnic Institute). Since first International WWW Conference in 1994, "this prestigious conference series has provided a public forum for the WWW Consortium (W3C) through the annual W3C track. The technical program will include refereed paper presentations, alternate track presentations, plenary sessions, panels, and poster sessions. Tutorials and workshops will precede the main program, and a Developers Day, devoted to in-depth technical sessions designed specifically for web developers." The deadline for paper submissions closes November 14, 2003; for tutorial/workshop proposals the deadline is October 15, 2003.

Refereed Papers Track

"WWW2004 seeks original papers describing research in all areas of the Web. Papers should not have been published or be in submission at another conference or journal. Topics include but are not limited to:

• Applications
• Browsers and User Interfaces
• Data Mining
• Electronic Commerce (potential papers should be submitted to the EC'04 Conference, which is co-located with WWW2004)
• Mobility and Wireless Access
• Performance and Reliability
• Search
• Security and Privacy
• Semantic Web
• Web Engineering"

Summaries of Selected Tracks

WWW 2002 will have a Refereed Papers Track as well as an Alternate Tracks program which includes a combination of peer-reviewed papers and invited presentations. Here are summaries from selected tracks:

• Search. "The Web has over three billion pages stored at millions of servers. HTML is the embedding medium of choice, with evolving XML-based data exchange standards. The extreme heterogeneity in organization and structure makes it difficult to harness the power in this critical information resource. While search engines have made great strides in recent years, especially in terms of hyperlink analysis, we anticipate further exciting developments in Web search, specifically, new technologies that will help break through the barriers of syntactic search and content heterogeneity..."

• Mobility and Wireless Access. "The Mobility and Wireless Access area of WWW'2004 solicits papers dealing with mobile computing and wireless access technologies that promote the evolution of the Web based on seamless access, awareness, intelligence, and natural interaction. Seamless access refers to our interactions with a multitude of wirelessly interconnected embedded systems, mostly hidden in the background of our environment. Awareness refers to the ability of recognizing and locating people and objects in a non-obtrusive way. Intelligence refers to the ability of the digital environment to adapt itself to the people that live in it, learn from their behavior, and possibly recognize intent and habit. Natural interaction finally refers to advanced modalities like natural language understanding, speech and gesture recognition, as well as speech-synthesis, which will allow more human-like communication style..."

• Security and Privacy. "The Security and Privacy area is soliciting papers on all computer scientific aspects of security and privacy as they relate to the Web in general or more specifically to Web standards. We invite papers describing both theoretical and experimental research including (but not limited to) the following topics: Active content security; Anonymity, pseudonymity and identity management; Auditing and logging analysis; Authorization (including policy expression, evaluation and enforcement); Data center security; Digital signatures; Intrusion detection; Mobile code security; Privacy-enhancing technologies; Public key infrastructure; Rights management (including rights expression languages); Security in content distribution networks; User interfaces for security and privacy; Web server and caching denial of service protection; Web services security; XML security and privacy..."

• Data Mining. "The web has become the primary repository of the world's knowledge. Billions of pages, maintained by individuals and organizations around the world contain content, services and semantic associations on a wide range of topics. There are also many additional (possibly implicit) corpora associated with the web such as hyperlink usage data, site transaction logs, message boards, query streams, and chat sessions. Thus the web provides a rich domain for using data mining techniques to both extract useful knowledge from this huge and diverse corpus, and to study the structural properties (size, shape, growth) and social aspects of the web (hubs, communities, weblogs). The focus of the Data Mining area of the WWW 2004 refereed papers track includes, but is not limited to, the following topics: Machine learning and mining for unstructured, semistructured, and relational data; Classification, clustering, collaborative recommender systems; Adapting data mining techniques for web data; Deriving facts, associations and lists from web data; Information extraction and message understanding; Mining associated corpora: queries, usage, messages, transactions. Mining using hyperlink graph analysis, e.g., communities, structural properties, evolution..."

• Semantic Web. "The Semantic Web vision of the web involves the sharing and processing of data by automated tools as well as by people. The Web's full potential can only be reached when computers are better able to process the information available in it, to automatically integrate data from different sources, to perform actions on behalf of the user, and to search for information based on its meaning rather than its syntactic form. This vision requires new and advanced methods, models, tools, and systems for services related to access, retrieval, integration, and filtering of Web-based content. Quality contributions are solicited on the theoretical basis and foundations of the Semantic Web, the overall design of the Semantic Web, Semantic Web systems design, and application experience covering a range of topics and technologies needed to realise this vision, including: Information representation; Information integration; Ontologies; Performance and scalability; Programming systems; Provenance; Security; Semantic Web applications; Software tools..."