Abstract
It is our great pleasure to present you the technical programme of WWW 2012. The call for papers attracted a breath-taking number of 885 full paper submissions. 521 PC members and 235 supporting reviewers evaluated these papers. Based on 3247 reviews and meta-reviews as well as many discussions held online, the 27 track chairs and deputy chairs met with us for two full days in order to discuss and decide upon final acceptance of full papers. In the end, 108 papers - only 12% of the submissions - could be accommodated in the technical programme. These papers represent a well-balanced mix over the 13 tracks listed in the call for papers. Though the different tracks received very different numbers of submissions, our principal selection criterion was quality; hence, we neither enforced a proportional share of acceptances among the tracks nor did we favor tracks with lower numbers of submissions.