Semantics, intelligent processing and services for big data

With the continuous increase of data, scaling up to unprecedented amounts, generated by Internet-based systems, Big Data has emerged as a new research field, coined as "Big Data Science". The core of Big Data Science is the extraction of knowledge from data as a basis for intelligent services and decision making systems, however, it encompasses many research topics and investigates a variety of techniques and theories from different fields, including data mining and machine learning, information retrieval, analytics, and indexing services, massive processing and high performance computing. Altogether the aim is the development of advanced data-aware knowledge based systems. This special issue presents advances in Semantics, Intelligent Processing and Services for Big Data and their applications to a variety of domains including mobile computing, smart cities, forensics and medicine. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.