15th String Processing and Information Retrieval Symposium
Melbourne Australia, November 10-12

History of SPIRE

SPIRE 2008 is 15th edition of the Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval. The first four editions of this series focused primarily on string processing (SP) and were held in South America. These four events were called South American Workshop on String Processing (WSP) and were first held in 1993 at Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

From 1998 the focus of the workshop broadened to include the area of information retrieval (IR) due to its increasing relevance and its inter-relationship with the area of string processing. Also, the attendance increased considerably and the workshop became a symposium, the Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE).

In addition, since 2000, the conference venue has been alternating between South and Latin America and Europe, being hosted in Europe on even years.

Here is a list of the recent past venues of SPIRE:

The scope of the SPIRE series of conferences includes not only fundamental algorithms in SP and IR but also contributions in different application areas like biocomputing, DNA sequencing, WWW based IR systems and IR related languages like SGML and XML. Given its inter-disciplinary nature, it offers a singular opportunity for researchers from computer science, information science and engineering interested in working with problems related to these areas to meet and discuss how to collaborate toward the best solutions.

The conference has a Steering Committee that every year examines the proposed symposium venues. The committee is currently composed of 10 internationally known researchers. Members of the committee are drawn from the organisers of past SPIRE.

Sponsors