Special Section: Scalable information systems

As data and knowledge volumes keep increasing, and global means for information dissemination continues to diversify, new methods, modeling paradigms and structures are needed to effi- ciently support the mounting scalability requirements for the large variety of current and future data, information, and knowledge [1-3]. Grid computing, peer-to-peer technology, data and knowl- edge bases, distributed information retrieval technology, and net- working technology should all converge to address the scalability concern. This special section compiles recent work on addressing scalability issues of distributed and peer-to-peer systems.