Twenty years on the road: four IR conference series pinned to host cities on five continents, and two pandemic editions that never left the internet

Annual main-conference editions of SIGIR, SIGIR-AP, WSDM, CIKM and The Web Conference (WWW / TheWebConf), calendar years 2007–2026, reconciled from official conference pages, ACM proceedings, DBLP and secondary histories. Scrub or play the timeline; hover any dot for dates, host and source. Status as of 27 August 2026.

2026

SIGIR SIGIR-AP WSDM CIKM The Web Conference (no host verifiable — matrix only) scheduled after 27 Aug 2026

Online-only lane — pandemic editions held fully online (planned host named by the source, not plotted on the map)

Year-by-series matrix — where the record is solid, thin, or missing

Filled dot = edition with a verified host city · thin outline = year attested in the sources, host unverified · thick ring = online-only edition · dashed = scheduled after 27 Aug 2026 · blank = not verified in the supplied sources (SIGIR-AP is first attested in 2023; WSDM began in 2008)

WSDM 2021 (planned for Jerusalem) and CIKM 2021 (planned for the Gold Coast) ran fully online — the map keeps them in the labelled online lane rather than at a host that never received them. Sources: wsdm-conference.org, en.wikipedia.org

The Web Conference is the one series the supplied sources never pin to a host city: only its 2018 and 2022–2026 editions are attested by year, so its row in the matrix carries outlines only. Sources: wikicfp.com, github.com

SIGIR-AP is the youngest series here — first attested in 2023, with located editions in Tokyo (December 2024) and Xi'an (December 2025, run as a hybrid with a satellite venue at the University of Queensland). Sources: dblp.org, dl.acm.org

As of 27 August 2026 only one located edition is still ahead: CIKM 2026 in Rome, 7–11 November — the hollow ring on the map. Source: arxiv.org

The edition-level records behind the map

Series	Year	Dates	Host	Format	Status	Source

Built from four supplied result sets totalling 1,102 evidence rows (a broad cross-series scan plus structured SIGIR/SIGIR-AP, WSDM and CIKM candidate rows), deduplicated to the 37 edition-level records in the table: 35 with a verified physical host, 2 online-only. A dot is one annual main-conference edition; workshops, paper mentions, malformed years and duplicate evidence rows were rejected, and official/ACM/DBLP pages were preferred when sources disagreed (one arXiv preprint placing CIKM 2023 in Hamburg was set aside in favour of the Birmingham record). Year-only attestations appear in the matrix but were cut from the table for space; blank matrix cells mean the supplied sources verify nothing, not that no edition took place. Compiled as of 27 August 2026.