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The LNCS journal Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems focuses on data management, knowledge discovery, and knowledge processing, which are core and hot topics in computer science. Since the 1990s, the Internet has become the main driving force behind application development in all domains. An increase in the demand for resource sharing across different sites connected through networks has led to an evolution of data- and knowledge-management systems from centralized systems to decentralized systems enabling large-scale distributed applications providing high scalability. Current decentralized systems still focus on data and knowledge as their main resource. Feasibility of these systems relies basically on P2P (peer-to-peer) techniques and the support of agent systems with scaling and decentralized control. Synergy between grids, P2P systems, and agent technologies is the key to data- and knowledge-centered systems in large-scale environments.

This, the 18th issue of Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems, contains extended and revised versions of seven papers presented at the 24th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA 2013, held in Prague, in the Czech Republic, in August 2013. Following the conference, and two further rounds of reviewing and selection, five extended papers and two invited keynote papers were chosen for inclusion in this special issue. The subject areas covered include argumentation, e-government, business processes, predictive traffic estimation, semantic model integration, top-k query processing, uncertainty handling, graph comparison, community detection, genetic programming, and web services.

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Using Argumentation to Structure E-Participation in Policy Making.- Horizontal Business Process Model Integration.- Exact and Approximate Generic Multi-criteria Top-k Query Processing.- Continuous Predictive Line Queries for On-the-Go Traffic Estimation.- Query Operators for Comparing Uncertain Graphs.- Fast Disjoint and Overlapping Community Detection.- A Hybrid Approach Using Genetic Programming and Greedy Search for QoS-Aware Web Service Composition.

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Roland Wagner, Kunsthistoriker und Germanist, ist Stipendiat der Fazit-Stiftung und Spezialist für den Einfluss der Philosophie Friedrich Nietzsches auf die Kunst.

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