Preface

Nowadays a great attention is devoted to the issue of managing and mining Big Data, whose main goal consists in efficiently representing and extracting useful knowledge from such kind of data that encompass the well-known 3V character-istics, i.e. Volume, Velocity and Variety. This, having recognized that traditional approaches developed during several years of data management and mining research are not suitable to comply with such novel characteristics. Another relevant property of Big Data to be considered is represented by their strict coupling with emerging Cloud Computing environments, which try to deal with research challenges deriving from managing and mining Big Data via specialized architectures, platforms and paradigms based on the principles of high-performance, high-availability and resource virtualization.