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WWW8
(A Very Brief Overview)
7/27/1999
by Edward Piou

Note: more in-depth coverage of open source and patent issues at WWW8 is available. In-depth coverage of predictions from the conference is also available.

According to conference organizers, over one thousand Web and Internet professionals and researchers gathered from May 11-14, 1999, in Toronto, Canada, for the Eighth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW8). Produced by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2) and Foretec Seminars, WWW8 showcased the latest web-related developments and trends to come out of the academic and industrial research communities. The presentations and papers at WWW8 tended to deal more with the nuts and bolts of the Web, the underlying technology, than the presentations at most industry conferences.

All-day pre-conference courses were available on Monday, May 10th for those who came to town especially early. The next day, tutorials on everything from web security to user interface design with Java were offered in parallel with workshops where attendees came together to discuss the latest trends in distance learning, hypertext functionality, and other areas. One and a half hour sessions, at which presenters discussed the contents of the papers they submitted to WWW8, were offered on Wednesday and Thursday, followed by a Developer's Day on Friday.

The first, and probably most-anticipated, keynote speaker was Tim Berners-Lee, the director of the World-Wide Web Consortium. His speech was essentially a look back at how far the World-Wide Web had come in its first ten years, and a look forward at how he hoped it would develop. His main hope for the future? Greater interactivity, and ease of use. (By interactivity, he didn't mean letting users interact with someone else's data; he meant making it easier for everyone to put their own data online.) Three industry leaders - Robert Metcalfe of 3Com Corporation, Greg Papadopoulos of Sun Microsystems, and John Patrick of IBM - also gave keynotes, outlining their personal and professional visions of the web.

Prizes were given out to one submitted paper and one poster presentation at the end of the conference. Focused Crawling: a new approach to topic-specific Web resource discovery, by Soumen Chakrabarti of the Indian Institute of Technology, Martin van den Berg of FX Palo Alto Laboratory, and Byron Dom of IBM Almaden Research Center, won the best paper award. (Full text of this paper, and many of the others discussed at the conference, are available at http://www8.org/fullpapers.html.) WebPlaces: Adding People to the Web, by Paul P. Maglio and Rob Barrett of the IBM Almaden Research Center, won the best poster award.

WWW9 will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, May 15-19, 2000.