Proceedings of the 12th international conference on World Wide Web

Welcome to Budapest and WWW2003, the twelfth of the original conference series organized by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2). WWW2003 is particularly special since it is the first of the series to be held in Central Europe. We are especially excited about having the event in Budapest since Hungary is proving itself to be an area of rapid technology growth in a region that has been "under-served" as a venue for technology events. This growth has been a part of one of the most dynamically developing economies among the forthcoming members of the European Union. Likewise, Budapest has become an outstanding educational, scientific, economical and cultural center of that part of Europe. We hope that all of these factors will contribute to a productive, entertaining, and memorable experience for you at WWW200.We believe that the WWW2003 Program Co-Chairs, Yih-Farn Robin Chen, László Kovács, and Steve Lawrence, along with an exceptional international Program Committee have assembled one of the finest technical programs of this conference series. Despite the numerous issues, political and economic, which challenge the Web research community today, this committee received the largest number of paper submissions for the conference series to date. These submissions were generally of outstanding quality thereby making the Program Committee's task extremely challenging. The diversity of the conference's Refereed Papers Track reflects the research areas highlighted in WWW2003 and the range of interests held by the conference attendees.We hope that these proceedings will help you to reference the paper presentations that you are able to attend as well as still benefit from those you are unable to experience in person. When you return to your home institutions, we hope that as you refer to these proceedings that you will have memories of your attendance at WWW2003 and your visit to Budapest.