Web Intelligence (WI) is a new direction for scientific research and development that explores the fundamental roles as well as practical impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and advanced Information Technology (IT) on the next generation of Web-empowered products, systems, services, and activities. It is the key and the most urgent research field of IT in the era of World Wide Web and agent intelligence. The 2003 IEEE/WIC International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI 2003) is a high-quality, high-impact conference, which is jointly held with the 2003 IEEE/WIC International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT 2003). The IEEE/WIC 2003 joint conferences are sponsored and organized by IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computational Intelligence (TCCI) and by Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), an international organization dedicated to the promotion of world-wide scientific research and industrial development in the era of Web and agent intelligence.

Following the great success of WI 2001 held in Maebashi City, Japan in 2001 (http://kis.maebashi-it.ac.jp/wi01/), WI 2003 will provide a leading international forum for researchers and practitioners (1) to present the state-of-the-art WI technologies; (2) to examine performance characteristics of various approaches in Web-based intelligent information technology; and (3) to cross-fertilize ideas on the development of Web-based intelligent information systems among different domains.

By idea-sharing and discussions on the underlying foundations and the enabling technologies of Web intelligence, WI 2003 is expected to stimulate the future development of new models, new methodologies, and new tools for building a variety of embodiments of Web-based intelligent information systems.