Cyberworlds

The word "cyberspace" was coined by the Canadian science fiction writer William Gibson and became very popular largely due to his novel Neuromancer. The term "cyberspace", as it is commonly used now, refers to objects and identities that exist within the computing network. Therefore we consider events taking place on the Internet as happening in cyberspace rather than in the countries where the participants or the network servers are actually located.

What are Cyberworlds?

The term "cyberworlds" was introduced by Tosiyasu L. Kunii in the book Cyberworlds edited by T.L. Kunii and A. Luciani (Springer, 1998). Cyberworlds are information worlds formed in cyberspace. Cyberworlds can be created either intentionally or spontaneously. As information worlds, they can be virtual or real, as well as mixed reality.

In terms of information modelling, the theoretical ground for the Cyberworlds is far above the level of integrating spatial and temporal database models. Cyberworlds have been created and applied in such areas as e-business, e-commerce, e-manufacturing, e-learning, and cultural heritage. The international conferences on Cyberworlds deal with distributed information worlds created on networks as well as methods and tools used for making such worlds.

Conference History

The first workshop on cyberworlds was held as the International Workshop on Synthetic Worlds (University of Aizu, Japan, 1993)  to explore the meaning, philosophy and the potential of the worlds synthesized on the web as well as in computational spaces in general. The proceedings were published as a book entitled "Cyberworlds" (Springer Verlag, 1998, 354 pages, ISBN: 4431702075, edited by T.L.Kunii and A.Luciani).

Since then, the conferences are organized yearly. The proceedings of the previous conferences CW2002, CW2003, CW2004, CW2005, and CW2006 can be found here.

Cyberworlds 2007

To find out more about the Cyberworlds 2007, you might want to take a look at the Call for Papers and the CW 2007 Program Committee.