Special Issue: Grid, Cloud and Sky Applications for Knowledge-based Industries and Businesses Guest Editors:

Informatica is a journal primarily covering intelligent systems in the European computer science, informatics and cognitive community ; scientific and educational as well as technical, commercial and industrial. Its basic aim is to enhance communications between different European structures on the basis of equal rights and international refereeing. It publishes scientific papers accepted by at least two referees outside the author's country. In addition , it contains information about conferences, opinions, critical examinations of existing publications and news. Finally, major practical achievements and innovations in the computer and information industry are presented through commercial publications as well as through independent evaluations. Editing and refereeing are distributed. Each editor from the Editorial Board can conduct the refereeing process by appointing two new referees or referees from the Board of Referees or Editorial Board. Referees should not be from the author's country. If new referees are appointed, their names will appear in the list of referees. Each paper bears the name of the editor who appointed the referees. Each editor can propose new members for the Editorial Board or referees. Editors and referees inactive for a longer period can be automatically replaced. Changes in the Editorial Board are confirmed by the Executive Editors. The coordination necessary is made through the Executive Editors who examine the reviews, sort the accepted articles and maintain appropriate international distribution. In the past decade, we have witnessed spurt of activity in the area of distributed computing. Several new distributed computing paradigms have emerged that promise to facilitate the delivery of software-based services at unprecedented scale. This includes the emergence of Grid, Cloud, Sky and Fog computing technologies. These middleware technologies are increasingly used for the development of data and computationally intensive, Web-based applications, involving the use of geographically dispersed resources and potentially huge number of users. With our current experience, it may be forseen that in the future applications will be completely detached from the underlying infrastructures and will be able to elastically scale based on dynamically changing requirements. Middleware solutions facilitating such applications are currently of interest to many knowledge based industries and businesses, active in the areas of engineering, finance , medicine, biology, pharmacy, telecommunications and so on, since they are facing challenging scientific and engineering problems. Important research and technology development areas at the moment include the investigation of industrial and scientific requirements for distributed computing applications, architectural considerations, the use of the Model …