The study of knowledge and information processing has now matured to a multi-disciplinary area that spans many applications and research communities. Vendors in electronic commerce routinely manage their on-line inventory databases with facilities to process temporal and spatial information. Application designers utilize data warehousing and knowledge discovery techniques to mine product databases in order to provide decision support for predicting market trends. Internet users employ intelligent information retrieval methods to access on-line digital libraries and the World Wide Web. Software engineers design software cooperatively using components and specifications stored in distributed databases. Developers of human-machine interfaces use knowledge in visualization, hypertext, hypermedia, and multimedia. Techniques in soft computing, evolutionary computing, learning, adaptation, uncertainty management, and agents are actively studied in the design of high performance computer systems, distributed intelligent systems, and mobile systems. Emerging applications, like biomedicine, geographical information processing, and electronic commerce, are prime targets for applying new knowledge and information processing techniques.
This journal seeks to bridge the gap between theory and practice in knowledge and information processing. In addition to publishing original high-quality research papers, we also publish critical review papers that survey the state of the art, and papers on vision and directions that discuss industry trends, government funding, and emerging focus. Each paper goes through a thorough review process in order to ensure its quality. Interested authors should refer to the submission guidelines on the journal home page and at the end of this issue.
We are very fortunate to have a distinguished board of Editors and Associate Editors, who are well known in their respective areas. We would like to thank our three regional Editors, Nabil R. Adam (North and South America), John A. Barnden (Europe) and Ning Zhong (Asia and Australasia) and all our Associate Editors for their help, advice and comments. All of them have also pledged to process submitted papers with a short turnaround time in order to ensure their timeliness.
This premiere issue has four regular and two short papers. Its main theme, Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, is an emerging research area that integrates methods from several fields, including machine learning, statistics, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, and database systems, for the analysis of large volumes of data. We are indebted to the members of the editorial board, the authors, and the reviewers who worked hard to put this first issue together.