Proceedings of the 15th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management

We welcome you to the 15th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge (CIKM 2006). This year CIKM received a record 537 submissions! From these we accepted 81 (15%) as full papers. Due to the quality of submissions, we additionally accepted 56 posters. Such highly competitive selection puts CIKM in a small group of prominent conferences. This is also reflected in the quality of the research program, for which we are extremely pleased.As in past CIKM conferences, the assembled program spans the areas of databases (DB), information retrieval (IR), and knowledge management (KM). This year, the DB track papers address issues on data streams, skyline, ranking and similarity computations, as well as query processing, and indexing. The IR track covers traditional topics, but also has papers on estimation, personalization, and summarization. The KM track focuses on data, text and web mining, and management of knowledge. The submission process was organized into the three corresponding tracks with corresponding Program Committees. There was also a separate industry track whose papers were reviewed by members of the program committees. In total we received 119 submissions in the DB track, 245 in the IR, 154 in the KM, and 19 submissions in the industrial track.CIKM has matured to become a truly international conference, attracting submissions from all around the world. This year, less than half of the submitted papers were from North America (48%), while Asia and Europe followed with 24% and 20%, respectively. We also had 18 submissions from South America, 17 from Australia, and 4 from Africa. The author coordinates spanned more than 35 countries!