An overflow attendance of more than 1,000 is expected at the Second International World-Wide Web Conference, "Mosaic and the Web," in Chicago Oct. 17-20. Originally limited to 600, registrations were sold out eight weeks following the July announcement of the event.
Attendance is expected to triple the number who went to the first international Web conference, held last May at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, near Geneva, Switzerland. Interest in the conference especially surprised the organizers since advertising was done only on the Web itself and through contributed distributions by sponsors and supporters. More than 10,000 interested persons accessed the Open Software Foundation (OSF) server listing Web conference registration information.
Sponsors include the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the OSF Research Institute, the National Science Foundation, and CERN, in cooperation with UniForum.
Keynote speaker is Dr. Larry Smarr, director NCSA. Smarr will speak on "Mosaic and the Future of the National Information Infrastructure."
Day one of the conference, Oct. 17, is devoted to eight tutorials, covering an introduction to Mosaic, advanced features of Mosaic, basic and advanced topics in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), management of content on WWW servers, systems administration of Web servers, system administration of WWW servers, media issues, and security.
Days two and three, Oct. 18 and 19, will feature two days of conference sessions, including presentation of 178 papers in 50 panel sessions, each with between one and seven papers. Both technology and user experiences are included. For example:
The range of attendees is expected to be wider than at last May's conference. But according to Ira Goldstein, conference co-chairman and director of research and advanced development at the OSF Research Institute, it's primarily for people who know the Internet. "It is for end users who have heard of the Internet and maybe have started looking at the Web, who really want to get a perspective on what's happening in other user sites, what the technology suppliers are doing and, maybe, what's coming down the road next," says Goldstein.
Future conferences are being planned by the International World-Wide Web Conference Committee, at the rate of two per year. One is planned for next spring at the Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics in Darmstadt, Germany. The site for the Fall 1995 conference has not been decided.
Complete information about the upcoming conference can be viewed on the Web. The access URL is:
http://rlww.osf.org:8001/ri/announcements/WWW_Conf_F94.html