International World-Wide Web (WWW) conferences have been scheduled for December 1995 in Boston, MA, and May 1996 in Paris, by the International WWW Conference Committee (IW3C2), at its meeting in Washington, D.C., this month.
The conferences are follow-ons to the Third International WWW Conference to be held April 10-14, 1995, in Darmstadt, Germany, under conference chair Detlef Kroemker. In addition to the semiannual international conferences, the committee has expressed support for a regional conference to be held in Australia, tentatively scheduled for September 1995.
Previous international WWW conferences have attracted overflow audiences-1,300 at the last conference in Chicago. The conferences will continue to be organized by local sponsors-the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics for the Darmstadt conference. Also, "The intent of the committee is that the conferences will definitely continue to present refereed papers," said committee member Corinne Moore, director of marketing for UniForum, meaning that the authors must submit a white paper for approval of designated referees to become part of the conference schedule. Exhibits will be by technically astute organizations and pertinent to WWW technology, she said.
"Another goal of the committee is to have a central home page for all WWW conferences," Moore said, where interested persons can get current information. That home page will be handled by either the Institute for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, where the Web was born, or at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The first planning meeting for World-Wide Web conferences was held last May and the first official meeting of the 18-member committee was held last August in Boston. Membership was determined by officials at CERN and NCSA. Although the committee has been operating on an ad-hoc basis, proposed statutes have now been drawn up and discussed. Yet to be decided are such issues as the terms of members and the committee's legal status. Co-chairs of the committee are the organizers of the immediate past and upcoming international W3 conferences.
The Darmstadt conference will be open to participants with all levels of experience, from beginners to experts. Suggestions for tutorials and workshops within the general scope of the conference are welcomed. Tutorial proposals can be sent via e-mail to www95_tutorial@igd.fhg.de, and workshop proposals to www95_workshop@igd.fhg.de. Developers Day will feature discussion of Web technology among developers, who may send position statements to www95_developer@igd.fhg.de.
The Boston conference is scheduled for the week of Dec. 11, 1995 and the Paris conference for May 4-10, 1996.
Information on registration for the Darmstadt conference is available on the Web at http://www@igd.fhg.de/www95.html or by contacting the WWW'95 Conference Secretariat, c/o Froundoher IGD Wilhelminester. 7, D 64283 Darmstadt, Germany, phone +49-6151-155-140, e-mail www95_office@igd.fhg.de.