EIC Editorial: State of the Transactions

To cover promising research topics, TKDE has kept a tradition of organizing and publishing special issues in a timely manner. We published a special issue on Mining Biological Data in the August 2005 issue, and another special issue on Intelligent Data Preparation in the September 2005 issue. Meanwhile, to maintain the health of TKDE's current publication queue and to avoid negative impact on the cycle time for our regular papers, we are very selective in special issue topics. We do not have any special issues scheduled for 2006, but in 2007, we will be publishing three special issues on Knowledge and Data Engineering in the Semantic Web Era, Customer Relationship Management: Data Mining Meets Marketing, and Knowledge and Data Management and Engineering in Intelligence and Security Informatics, respectively. Emerging topics on special issues are always welcome, but we will accept special issue proposals in a very careful way. W ELCOME to the 18th volume of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)! Several positive changes have taken place in 2005 and I am looking forward to another healthy and productive year in 2006.