Guest Editors ’ Introduction to the Special Section on the 27 th International Conference on Data Engineering ( ICDE 2011 )

THE 27th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2011) was held in Hannover, Germany, on 11-16 April. ICDE 2011 received 491 research manuscripts, 26 industrial contributions, and 67 demo proposals, for a total of over 584 submissions. The research program featured 98 papers, the industrial program included eight submitted papers, and 21 demonstration proposals were selected for presentation to the conference audience. This special section consists of journal versions of eight best papers among the 98 research papers accepted by the program committees. These papers have been significantly revised, improved, and extended beyond their initial version that appears in the proceedings of ICDE 2011. They went through a rigorous review process to ensure the high quality and comply with TKDE publication standards. The first paper, titled “Computing Structural Statistics by