TKDE 17(6) (June 2005) Editorial: TKDE Topic Area Revisions

Xindong Wu (Editor-in-Chief) and Christos Faloutsos (Associate Editor-in-Chief)

1. Introduction

With input from the Editorial Board, we have revised TKDE's topic areas to (1) streamline the focus areas of the journal, and (2) cover new emerging areas and technological advancements. We have also taken an inclusive approach when reviewing and revising existing topics.

Our revisions received "no objections" from the IEEE Computer Society Publications Board at its meeting of Wednesday, March 9, 2005, and this editorial documents the main changes in our revisions.

2. TKDE Focus Areas

Based on the reputation TKDE has established in the past 16 years, we have identified three focus areas (in alphabetic order): (1) data mining, (2) databases and data modeling, and (3) knowledge engineering and intelligent systems. We strongly encourage paper submissions that contribute towards the integration of these focus areas.

The journal has been receiving a large number of paper submissions in data mining each year in recent years. We believe TKDE is arguably (or unarguably) the best journal to publish data mining and database research. TKDE is also the premier journal in knowledge engineering.

3. Underlying Computational Platforms and Emerging Applications

In addition to the three focus areas in Section 2, we have also listed underlying computational platforms and emerging applications as two additional subject areas for TKDE, each of which can cover one or more of the three focus areas above. We have named these two subject areas, ``Underlying Computational Platforms for Knowledge and Data Engineering'' and ``Emerging Knowledge and Data Engineering Applications'', to clearly indicate that TKDE does not claim general topics such as Distributed and Parallel Systems, Bioinformatics, and Web Services, but we do have very relevant areas, such as distributed data mining, distributed databases, distributed expert systems, and data analysis and knowledge processing in bioinformatics and Web services, that are active research topics in TKDE.

These two subject areas have also simplied the original topic listing. For example, there were "distributed file systems", "distributed control", "distributed query processing", and "distributed [knowledge] processing" in the original topic listing.

4. Main Revisions

Our revisions have been performed at two levels: one on the subject areas, and the other on the itemized topics under each subject area.

As mentioned in Sections 2 and 3, there are now five subject areas:

After the above subject areas had been identified, we examined each topic in the original topic listing carefully to check the following possibilities: Appropriate action has been taken with each of these possibilities. For example, in Databases and Data Modeling, we have taken out "database views" and "relational models" due to the lack of recent interest, and in Knowledge Engineering and Intelligent Systems, we have combined "inference control" and "logical inference" into "inference engines". Meanwhile, we have also added new topics in each of the five subject areas. For example,

4. Concluding Remarks

We have taken an open approach in the topic area revisions, and we believe the revised version is more relevant and more up-to-date in relation to the field of knowledge and data engineering, with clearly identified focus areas. Meanwhile, since knowledge and data engineering is still an evolving field, we need to update our topic listing with new emerging areas and technological advancements when the need arises again. Comments and advice are always welcome.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following Associate Editors for their comments and advice during the revision process: Johannes Gehrke, Nick Koudas, Jiming Liu, Ling Liu, and Qiang Yang.

Appendix: Revised TKDE Topic Areas

This revised version has been put at the journal website <http://www.computer.org/tkde/author_new.htm#SubjectAreas>, and is given below for the record.

DATA MINING

DATABASES AND DATA MODELING KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING AND INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS UNDERLYING COMPUTATIONAL PLATFORMS FOR KNOWLEDGE AND DATA ENGINEERING EMERGING KNOWLEDGE AND DATA ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS

This page has been accessed times since March 28, 2005.