Editorial Preface Special Theme Issue Data Management for E-business

i Over the last few years, there has been tremendous business growth in the area of e-business. We are pleased to present a special issue of the Journal of Database Management on the theme " Data Management for e-business ". While the issue of data management in business is relatively mature, e-business imposes special demands, mainly because extensive amounts of data need to be made available across organizational boundaries to suppliers, customers and other external parties. This creates several issues at the managerial level, such as: a) how will the heterogeneity between data schemas across organizational boundaries be resolved, b) how will data quality be controlled, c) who in the organization will determine access rights to data, d) what are the security implications of exposing organizational data to the outside world, and e) how can intellectual property be protected when information is digitized? The growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) and new standards allow us to provide novel answers to these questions, at lower cost. One example is the hypertext markup language (HTML) standard which allows a universal point-and-click graphical user interface to users of data, thereby greatly simplifying the mechanism for providing access to the data and reducing the cost of system development. A second example is the extensible markup language (XML) standard that provides a low-cost method of allowing data exchange between heterogeneous systems, regardless of their underlying storage and access mechanisms. The formation of several XML-based data model definitions within domains as varied as science, engineering, business, and medicine represents an important trend in allowing data to be shared across the boundaries of organizations within these domains. Thus, while ebusiness presents several unique problems, emerging technologies can provide potential solutions to these problems as well. In this special issue, we present four high-quality research articles that utilize emerging technologies to