In the current digital information age, a critical issue is how we process the knowledge behind the huge amount of information that appears every day through every aspect of life (news, social media, TV, radio, email, blogs, papers and so on). Everywhere you look, the quantity of information in the world is soaring, at the beginning of 21st century there was the estimation that the world produces one to two exabytes (billion gigabytes) of unique information every year (Lyman and Varian, 2000), The Economist estimates that mankind created 150 exabytes of data in 2005 and 1,200 exabytes in 2010. That means lots of data in form of text, numbers, images, sounds, etc. that are deemed important by humans for different purposes.

The problem is the capacity to process, understand and take advantage from this information overload. Visualization techniques have the ability to convey information at the high bandwidth of the human perceptual system, facilitating recognition of patterns in the information space and supporting navigation in large collections (Thomas et al., 2001). However, the challenge is not only knowledge representation in information system but highly interactive environments that offer a deep data interaction that allows non trivial knowledge discovering and decision making by users.

The combination of visualization techniques, visual analytics techniques, data mining techniques, intelligent recommendation agents, user centered evaluation and usability patterns, etc. in interactive systems is a key issue for knowledge discovering in current and future information systems.

Areas for inclusion in this special issue comprise those related to knowledge discovering and visual analytics in interactive information systems. Every submission must spell out the implications of findings in the paper for highly human-computer interactive information systems. Topics covered include, but are not limited to:

Interactive knowledge discovering

Knowledge discovering in visual collaborative systems

Visual representations and interaction techniques

Analytical reasoning

Data representations and transformations

Visual analytics information systems experiences

Visualization in user centered system

Potential authors should submit full papers by the Submission Deadline. Manuscript should be submitted to fgarcia@usal.es. Manuscripts should not exceed 18 double-spaced pages. Papers should be prepared according to the JISE guidelines for authors. A template of submitted paper can be found at http://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/page/jise/InstructiontoAuthors.html. All papers will be blind reviewed.

Submission Deadline: January 31, 2012

Acceptance Notification: March 30, 2012

Final Manuscript Due: April 30, 2012

Publication Date: Vol. 28, No. 4, July 2012 (tentatively)

For more information, please contact the guest editors:

• Prof. F. J. García-Peñalvo
  University of Salamanca
  Spain
  fgarcia@usal.es



• Prof. R. Colomo-Palacios
  University Carlos III
  Madrid, Spain
  ricardo.colomo@uc3m.es



• Prof. Jane Yung-jen Hsu
  Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering
  National Taiwan University
  Taiwan
  yjhsu@csie.ntu.edu.tw