Keenable SELECT · 50 years of SIGIR, SIGIR-AP, WSDM, CIKM & The Web Conference

From Rochester 1978 to a worldwide circuit: five conference series spread across every inhabited continent, then went briefly online

Every recoverable edition of SIGIR, SIGIR-AP, WSDM, CIKM and The Web Conference (formerly WWW) in the requested 1977–2026 window, plotted at its host city. The first relevant event found is SIGIR 1978; the other series began later — CIKM in 1992, WWW in 1994, WSDM in 2008 and SIGIR-AP in 2023. Fully virtual editions sit in a labelled online lane below the map rather than at an invented coordinate.

1977

SIGIR SIGIR-AP WSDM CIKM WWW / The Web Conference ◦ outer ring = hybrid (physical + virtual) thin arcs join consecutive physical hosts of a series

1977 2026

For its first two decades SIGIR alternated between North America and western Europe; it first left both in 1998, for Melbourne, and has since visited Brazil, Singapore, China, Chile, Japan and Taiwan — dblp.uni-trier.de

In 2020–2021 the circuit went online: SIGIR ran as virtual events hosted from China and Canada, WWW from Taipei and Ljubljana, CIKM from Galway and the Gold Coast, and WSDM 2021 from Israel — dblp.uni-trier.de, ir.webis.de

SIGIR-AP, the newest series, gives the circuit a dedicated Asia-Pacific stop: Beijing in 2023, Tokyo in 2024 and Xi'an in 2025 — sigir-ap.org

Sources disagree on the 2026 Web Conference in Dubai: the official page lists April 13–17, while DBLP and IW3C2 list June 29 – July 3; SIGWEB has also announced Dublin as the 2027 host — thewebconf.org, sigweb.org

Every recoverable edition, 1978–2026

Year	Edition	Host	Dates	Mode	Source

Method: all recoverable editions from the cited series histories, consolidated from a 204-row extraction of DBLP series pages plus the official TheWebConf and SIGIR-AP sites, cross-checked against a 91-row set of official histories (SIGIR business-meeting notes, archived IW3C2 lists, CIKM history pages, the webis anthology). One dot is one conference edition; approximate city-centre coordinates were added for plotting only. Virtual and hybrid status is shown only where a source states it; exact dates are missing for many pre-2001 editions; SIGIR hosts for 2025–2026 and SIGIR-AP 2026 were not recoverable from the cited pages and are omitted; aggregator listings (10times) were not used. DBLP's "Dubin, Ireland" for SIGIR 2013 is shown as Dublin, per the brief's typo rule. For the 2026 Web Conference the official TheWebConf page (Dubai, April 13–17) is preferred over the conflicting DBLP/IW3C2 dates.