In the context of the 18th IFIP World Computer Congress (WCC'04), and beside the traditional organization of conferences, workshops, tutorials and student forum, it was decided to identify a range of topics of dramatic interest for the building of the Information Society. This has been featured as the "Topical day/session" track of the WCC'04. Topical Sessions have been selected in order to present syntheses, latest developments and/or challenges in different business and technical areas.

Building the Information Society provides a deep perspective on domains including: the semantic integration of heterogeneous data, virtual realities and new entertainment, fault tolerance for trustworthy and dependable information infrastructures, abstract interpretation (and its use for verification of program properties), multimodal interaction, computer aided inventing, emerging tools and techniques for avionics certification, bio-, nano-, and information technologies, E-learning, perspectives on ambient intelligence, the grand challenge of building a theory of the Railway domain, open source software in dependable systems, interdependencies of critical infrastructure, social robots, as a challenge for machine intelligence.

Building the Information Society comprises the articles produced in support of the Topical Sessions during the IFIP 18th World Computer Congress, which was held in August 2004 in Toulouse, France, and sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP).