Boston party for Web links team from Southampton

A team from the University of Southampton has been awarded a prestigious place at the fourth World Wide Web Conference in Boston next month, writes Tim Greenhalgh .

Leslie Carr, David De Roure, Wendy Hall and Gary Hill will present a paper on their Web version of the Microcosm application, "The Distributed Link Service: A Tool for Publishers, Authors and Readers".

The team hope that this will lead to its acceptance and more general adoption as a Web standard, allowing users greater control over hypertext links on given topics and ideas. The Southampton team's paper is one of 58 from around the world selected for the conference - The Web Revolution - from December 11-14 at the Boston Copley Marriott Hotel. The conference is sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science and the Open Software Foundation. It will bring together approximately 2,000 world-class researchers, developers, industrial leaders and users to discuss major advances in the state of Web technology in key areas such as security, virtual reality, tools and browsers, authoring environments and collaborative systems.

More than 200 papers were submitted to the conference programme committee covering major areas of Web-related research and technology. The committee was headed by Tim Berners-Lee, co-inventor of the Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium.

For those unable to attend the conference, key sessions will be broadcast via the Multicasting Backbone (M-BONE) on the Internet.

For further information visit the conference home page at: http://www.w3.org/WWW4/.