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Annual Conference on WWW Applications

A BRIEF HISTORY

The success of the international World Wide Web conferences, as organised by the International WWW Conference Committee, prompted the invention of a similar and local series for South African researchers and Web developers. Prof Pieter van Brakel, previous head of the Department of Information and Knowledge Management of the University of Johannesburg (UJ) consequently organised and chaired the 1st Annual Conference on World Wide Web Applications, held in 1999. The first international WWW conference was held in 1994 at the Web’s birthplace at CERN, Geneva and organised by Robert Cailliau, the person who wrote the first source code for a hypertext system for physicists, of what would eventually become today’s World Wide Web.
Tim Berners-Lee, who is generally being seen as the father of the Web and then also worked for CERN, was also a speaker at the 1994 event. Later, the International WWW Conference Committee was established, with its primary aim to arrange regular international WWW conferences. Today this Committee is better known by its acronym IW3C2 (http://www.iw3c2.org/). Robert played a prominent part in IW3C2’s earlier work, especially to lay down standards and guidelines for future international conferences in this field. A large contingent of international speakers were invited to the first South African event, for example Robert Cailliau of CERN and David Raitt (European Space Agency), to name but a few.
From the first event in 1999 the overall aim of the South African conferences was to provide academics, researchers and Web developers with an opportunity to describe and discuss novel Internet, Web and intranet applications and developments, and to exchange ideas on applying the Web for teaching and research purposes.		 The outstanding success of this first conference necessitated the arrangement of a second, a third and further events in the years to come. Academics and those from industry were brought together from the wide spectrum of human knowledge - with Web applications as the common denominator. The uniqueness of this common theme of conferencing is that researchers from different disciplines – for example pure sciences and social sciences - more than often would share the same podium or present their research results within the same track. Soon after its existence the conference organisers received an enquiry to host the Conference in a venue other than Johannesburg. This heralded the start of a bidding system to provide other areas of the country with the opportunity to host a Web applications conference.

Another major development in the twelve years of its existence is that it was endorsed as a Regional Conference by the above-mentioned international conference committee (IW3C2). The high standard of the papers submitted annually was the driving force behind this decision. A regional conference is defined as a conference whose goals and mission are similar to that of the international conference series but is organized for a specific geographical audience. Typical tracks that appear in the annual programmes were online learning, web-enabled business, e-government, cyberlaw, new web technologies, web development, the Web and society, web-based research methodologies, and more.
The month of September is each year set aside for ZA-WWW. The 12 years of conferencing created the opportunity for about 750 authors to present their research. Since 2005 these papers have been peer-reviewed according to the SA Department of Higher Education and Training’s requirements, and published permanently on the Conference website.



This conference is hosted by: OpenJournals Publishing.