Cloud Intelligence

This special section contains extended versions of the best papers from the 2nd International Workshop on Cloud Intelligence (Cloud-I 2013), which was held on August 26, 2013 in Riva del Garda, Italy, in conjunction with the 39th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB 2013). Business intelligence (BI) is a broad field related to integrating, storing and analyzing data to help decisionmakers in many domains (from actual business fields to administration, health and environment) make better decisions. Front-end analytics methods include reporting, on-line analytical processing (OLAP), and data mining. With the increasing success of cloud computing, cloud BI “as a service” offerings have sparkled widely, both from cloud start-ups and major BI industry vendors. Beyond porting BI features into the cloud, which already implies numerous issues (e.g., Big Data/NoSQL database modeling and storage, data localization, security and privacy, performance, cost and usage models), this trend also poses new, broader challenges for making data analytics available to small and middle-size enterprises (SMEs), nongovernmental organizations, Web communities (e.g., supported by social networks), and even the average citizen; this vision presumably requiring a mixture of both private and open data. Thus, Cloud Intelligence is not only a current technological and research challenge, but also an important economic and societal stake, since people increasingly demand open data, which they need to access easily from the Web, to possibly mix them with private data, to analyze them with intelligible on-line tools with advanced collaborative features that enable users to share and re-use BI concepts and analyses in large scale fashion, and to share the results world-wide. The aim of the Cloud-I workshop series is to be an interdisciplinary, regular exchange forum for researchers, industry and practitioners, as well as all potential users of Cloud Intelligence. The 2013 Call for Papers attracted 8 submissions from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. Each paper received 3 reviews by the distinguished Program Committee consisting of 15 leading researchers.