SPIRE'2003 is the tenth edition of the International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval.It has its origins in the South American Workshop on String Processing which was first held in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 1993. Starting in 1998, the focus of the symposium was broadened to include the area of of information retrieval due to its increasing relevance and its inter-relationship with the area of string processing.

Spire 2003 will be held in the Studio 5, a modern convention center designed for hosting meetings, conferences, exhibitions, and fairs. The symposium will be co-located with the 18th Brazilian Symposium on Databases (SBBD'03) and with the 17th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES'03).

The scope of the symposium includes not only fundamental algorithms in string processing but also contributions in different application areas like biocomputing, DNA sequencing, WWW based IR system and IR related languages like SGML and XML. Given its inter-disciplinarity, it offers a singular opportunity for researchers interested in working in these areas.