Web Intelligence (WI) has been recognized as a new direction for scientific research and development to explore the fundamental roles as well as practical impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) (e.g., knowledge representation, planning, knowledge discovery and data mining, intelligent agents, and social network intelligence) and advanced Information Technology (IT) (e.g., wireless networks, ubiquitous devices, social networks, wisdom Web, and data/knowledge grids) on the next generation of Web-empowered products, systems, services, and activities. It is one of the most important as well as promising IT research fields in the era of Web and agent intelligence.

The 2004 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI'04) will be jointly held with the 2004 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT'04). The IEEE/WIC/ACM 2004 joint conferences are sponsored and organized by IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computational Intelligence (TCCI), Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), and ACM-SIGART.

Following the great successes of WI'01 held in Maebashi City, Japan and WI'03 held in Halifax, Canada, WI 2004 provides a leading international forum for researchers and practitioners (1) to present the state-of-the-art of 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 2004 will capture current important developments of new models, new methodologies and new tools for building a variety of embodiments of Web-based intelligent information systems.