Call for Papers: Exploring Data Ecosystems and Markets: Trends and Insights

In an information era, the effective management, exchange, and utilization of data have become critical components in driving innovation and shaping the strategy of numerous enterprises. The exponential growth of data coupled with advancements in data analytics algorithms has led to the development of data ecosystems and markets. The former are composed of enterprises that aim to collaborate and exchange data while ensuring confidentiality. The latter are dynamic marketplaces where organizations, researchers, and individuals can buy and sell data assets. Both contribute to allowing enterprises to access more data and exploit their full potential, getting valuable insights for decision-making. To do that, both share challenges in integrating and providing high-quality data from heterogeneous sources to third parties, transferring the data into totally different contexts.

This special issue aims to provide a comprehensive exploration of the evolving dynamics surrounding data ecosystems and data markets. In fact, the development of these concepts presents multifaceted challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, the integration and availability of different data sources within ecosystems demand novel architectures and frameworks, quality and service requirements, interoperability standards, and robust security and privacy measures. On the other hand, for data markets economic models, pricing strategies, and regulatory frameworks are needed. In both contexts, an ethical perspective is required to guarantee a responsible exchange of data.

We seek to receive papers from both researchers and practitioners, who are willing to share their insights, research findings, and innovative solutions that address the challenges and leverage the opportunities presented by data ecosystems and markets.

Scope:
The scope of this special issue is broad, encompassing a wide range of topics related to data ecosystems and data markets. We encourage submissions related to but are not limited to the following topics:

- technological advances of data ecosystems and marketplaces,
- industry-specific use cases of data ecosystems and marketplaces,
- ethical considerations in data ecosystems and marketplaces
- 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 and data markets
- procedure Synthesis in data ecosystems
- data exchange architectures and concepts, architectures for data ecosystems and data markets
- human-centric concepts 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 ecosystems
- sustainability in data ecosystems
- applications and services for data management and exchange in data ecosystems
- support of methods in data ecosystems by generative AI
- Security, privacy, and trust mechanisms in data market transactions
- Data valuation and pricing mechanisms

Guest Editors:
Cinzia Cappiello, Politecnico de Milano, Italy (cinzia.cappiello@polimi.it)
Sandra Geisler, RWTH Aachen University, Germany (geisler@informatik.rwth-aachen.de)
Maria-Esther Vidal, TIB Hannover, Leibniz University, Hannover, Germany (vidal@l3s.de)
Jian Pei, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, United States (j.pei@duke.edu)
Xiaohui Yu, School of Information Technology, York University, Canada (xhyu@yorku.ca)

Important Dates:
Submission deadline: 31 October 2024
First-round review decisions: 31 December 2024
Deadline for revision submissions: 28 February 2025
Notification of final decision: 30 April 2025
Camera-ready manuscript: 31 May 2025

Submission Guidelines:
Authors are encouraged to submit high-quality, original work that has neither appeared in nor is under consideration by other journals. We would also welcome well-written survey articles and significant extensions over authors’ previously published PVLDB and conference papers. For experimental work, we encourage authors to make their paper artifacts (e.g., code, datasets) available for transparency and reproducibility.

Authors should prepare their manuscript according to the Instructions for Authors available from the VLDB website. Authors should submit through the online submission site at https://www.editorialmanager.com/vldb/default1.aspx and select “SI special issue on Exploring Data Ecosystems and Markets” when they reach the “Article Type” step in the submission process.

All papers will be reviewed following standard reviewing procedures of The VLDB Journal.