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 special issue contains extended and revised versions of 4 papers, selected from the 25 papers presented at the satellite events associated with the 17th East-European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS 2013), held on September 1-4, 2013 in Genoa, Italy. The three satellite events were GID 2013, the Second International Workshop on GPUs in Databases; SoBI 2013, the First International Workshop on Social Business Intelligence: Integrating Social Content in Decision Making; and OAIS 2013, the Second International Workshop on Ontologies Meet Advanced Information Systems. The papers cover various topics in large-scale data and knowledge-centered systems, including GPU-accelerated database systems and GPU-based compression for large time series databases, design of parallel data warehouses, and schema matching.

The special issue content, which combines both theoretical and application-based contributions, gives a useful overview of some of the current trends in large-scale data and knowledge management and will stimulate new ideas for further research and development within both the scientific and industrial communities.