This is the second time the conference is taking place outside the USA. Lisbon, Portugal, is hosting the 2007 event under joint organization between ACM and the University of Lisbon. This is happening at a time when Portugal is holding the presidency of the European Union and many other events are taking place around the city. Lisbon, also known as the city of the explorers, was the departing point for many of the voyages of discovery, and the first true world city, the capital of an empire spreading over all continents. This makes it an ideal place for convening scientists from around the world to exchange new ideas concerning searching, managing and exploring information.

The Program Co-chairs Alberto Laender, Deborah McGuinness and Ricardo Baeza-Yates rightfully deserve to be commended for assembling a superb Program Committee, which worked very hard to provide excellent peer feedback to the authors in a very short time. Thanks also to Bjorn Olstad and Oystein Haug Olsen, who chaired the Industrial Track.

We had a record number of submissions (above 700 abstracts!) and accepted 86 of the reviewed papers (512) for presentation as full papers (17%). Because we had so many good papers, we decided to accept 49 as short papers for joint presentation in a poster session, and extended the usual limit from two to four pages. 收起