Innovative research aspects of big data modelling, management and analytics

The theme big data has emerged has one of the most important hot topics in computer science research, with many outcomes both in the academy as well as in the industry sector.Indeed, the amount of research innovations that, nowadays, fall in the scope of big data research is really impressive, even stirred-up from an explosive advancement in technology, especially in the context of Cloud Computing and related areas, and inter-disciplinary research collaborations.In the so-delineated context, several open research issues arise.Among these, big data modelling, management and analytics play the major role, as they heavily influence the design, the development and the deployment of a plethora of models, algorithms and techniques that access, process and analyse big data repositories for knowledge-insight-discovery and decision-making purposes.Following these main motivations, recently the research community has devoted a great deal of attention to these challenges, so that many approaches have been proposed and experimentally assessed, with alternate fortune.Starting from this conceptual basis, the special issue "Innovative Research Aspects of Big Data Modelling, Management and Analytics" of Knowledge and Information Systems focuses the attention on research issues and challenges, as well as open problems and novel research directions, in the context of modelling, managing and analysing big data, from a solid data-engineering and knowledge-management theoretical and practical perspective.The papers selected from this special issue have been invited, as among the best papers, from the 33rd International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2022), held in Vienna, Austria, during August 22-24, 2022.After several rigorous review rounds, only four papers have been finally selected for being part of this special issue.In the following, we provide a brief overview on each of these papers.