WSDM 2009 conference review

Abstract

The 2 nd ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining was held in the Catalan capital Barcelona, Spain, from February 9 th to 12 th and chances are good that many will follow. The venue was located on the 3 rd floor of the 'Imagina Building' which hosts Yahoo! Research Barcelona as well. The majority of the people knew each other well and some of them just dropped by to meet friends and to say hello. The atmosphere throughout the conference was a pleasant one fostered by the circumstances that had led to the creation of the WSDM conference series in the first place: to bring together a small community of people with the specific focus on the topics 'Web Search' and 'Data Mining', topics not being entirely covered by other major conferences in this combination. The number of attendees totaled 225 including workshop participants. The conference featured 29 full papers (acceptance rate of ~16%) which had to pass a rigorous, two-stage review process. This year the session themes were Web Search, Classification & Clustering, Web Mining, User Interaction, Web Ranking and Graph Mining & Web Content.