Semantics Meets Big Data: Formal Models, Practical Issues, Novel Paradigms

Big Data management is playing a major role within the database research community and is posing a plethora of challenges that are of interest for both the academic side and the industrial side of the community, still reminding that this exciting research topic has been initially born within the context of the main industrial Web players (e.g., Google, Facebook, etc.). Several research issues arise here, ranging from representing Big Data to managing Big Data, from indexing Big Data to querying Big Data, from ranking Big Data to mining Big Data, etc. As orthogonal to all the outlined research challenges, Semantics of Big Data, which mainly concerns with the issue of equipping Big Data with fruitable, actionable knowledge, is a first-class axiomatic problem to deal with. In order to fulfill innovative requirements posed by the issue of combining Semantics methodologies with Big Data requirements, this special issue on Semantics Meets Big Data: Formal Models, Practical Issues, Novel Paradigms of Journal on Data Semantics presents a selection of papers of the 3rd International Conference on Model and Data Engineering (MEDI 2013), held in Amantea, Calabria, Italy, during September 25-27, 2013.