Discovering Knowledge through Highly Interactive Information Based Systems

The new Internet era has increased a production of digital data. The mankind had an easy way to the knowledge access never before, but at the same time the rapidly increasing rate of new data, the ease of duplication and transmission of these data across the Net, the new available channels for information dissemination, the large amounts of historical data, questionable quality of the existing data and so on are issues for information overload that causes more difficult to make decision using the right data. Soft-computing techniques for decision support systems and business intelligent systems present pretty interesting and necessary solutions for data management and supporting decision-making processes, but the last step at the decision chain is usually supported by a human agent that has to process the system outcomes in form of reports or visualizations. These kinds of information representations are not enough to make decisions because of behind them could be hidden information patterns that are not obvious for automatic data processing and humans must interact with these data representation in order to discover knowledge. According to this, the current special issue is devoted to present nine experiences that combine visualization and visual analytics techniques, data mining methods, intelligent recommendation agents, user centered evaluation and usability patterns, etc. in interactive systems as a key issue for knowledge discovering in advanced and emerging information systems.