**Special issue information:**

Data centricity plays a fundamental role in defining new and disruptive business models. Many organizations in public and private sectors have successfully adopted information technologies to build huge repositories of data that they can analyze to support decision-making and gain a competitive advantage. However, despite the paramount relevance of data- driven technologies, organizations demand alliance-driven infrastructures capable of supporting controlled data exchange across diverse stakeholders and transparent data management. Data ecosystems (DEs) are the future of data management since they allow companies to share data and collaborate to get valuable insights. Such benefits can be achieved only with a proper approach for generating and sharing knowledge. Thus, DEs aim to solve issues like managing unstructured and heterogeneous data, offering various data-centric services, including query processing and data analytics, exchanging, and integrating data while preserving personal data privacy, data security, and organizational data sovereignty. Hence, implementing a data ecosystem imposes challenges regarding, amongst others, data management, data quality, trust, data exchange, data integration, machine learning, and knowledge-based systems. Moreover, these interoperability issues have to be solved and data integration performed. In this special issue, we welcome innovative contributions that further the idea of data ecosystems and tackle the challenges resulting from the complexity of data ecosystems.

The topic is highly relevant and, recently, other special issues have been already published covering the topic, such as SI on Data Transparency in the ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality.

We are organizing a workshop on Data Ecosystems (DEco 2022) at the VLDB 2022 and will ask authors of selected high-quality papers to submit an extended version of their paper. But we also welcome papers from other authors.

** Topics of Interest **

The list of topics for the SI includes, but is not limited to:

Metadata management, semantic modeling, and enrichment in data ecosystems
Data transparency, provenance, and traceability in data ecosystems
Data sovereignty in Data Ecosystems
Concept and mapping discovery for data integration in data ecosystems
Data quality management and data curation in data ecosystems
Procedure synthesis in data ecosystems
Data exchange architectures and concepts, architectures for data ecosystems
Data security and privacy in data ecosystems
Formal models and vocabularies for metadata description
Experiences in domain-specific data ecosystems (health, energy, production, logistics, ..
Responsible and trustable data management in data ecosystem
Sustainability in data ecosystems
Applications and services for data management and exchange in data ecosystems

**Manuscript submission information:**

The journal’s submission platform (Editorial Manager®) is now available for receiving submissions to this Special Issue. Please refer to the Guide for Authors to prepare your manuscript, and select the article type of “VSI: DEco or Data Ecosystems” when submitting your manuscript online.

All submissions should be prepared according to the suggestions for MNE authors and will be peer-reviewed. Please see details from Guide for Authors at https://www.elsevier.com/journals/data-and-knowledge-engineering/0169-023X/guide-for-authors

** Important Dates **

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 31st Jan 2023
Editorial Acceptance Deadline: 30th Apr 2023