This issue of Data Science and Engineering (DSE) contains a collection of four extended papers from the WISE 2017 conference and two additional papers from the regular submissions to the DSE journal.

WISE, or the Web Information Systems Engineering Society, is an annual international web conference. WISE Society has established itself as a solid community aiming at high-quality research and offering the platform for advancing and progressing efforts in Web information systems-related topics. The objective is to share and exchange ideas, experience, and techniques in the area of World Wide Web with the underlying techniques and applications, including web technologies, internet architecture and protocol, information management, blockchain technologies, and big data.

The 2017 edition of WISE was held in Moscow, Russia, and attracted a total of 195 regular paper submissions, spanning over numerous active and emerging topic areas. The conference program committee selected 49 regular papers and 24 short papers to be presented at the conference and published in the conference proceedings [1].

The four extended papers for this special issue were selected from among all the accepted papers by the special issue guest editors Yunjun Gao and Lu Chen, based on the relevance to the journal and the reviews of the conference version of the papers. The authors were asked to revise the conference paper for journal publication and in accordance with customary practice to add 30% new materials. The revised papers again went through the normal journal-style review process and are finally presented to the readers in the present form. We appreciate the willingness of the authors to help in organizing this special issue.

The four extended papers in this special issue cover the entity detection and content extraction from web data, datatype inferring for RDF document matching, and k-core-truss discovering on graph data. In “A Frequent Named Entities based Approach for Interpreting Reputation in Twitter,” authors introduce the concept of Frequent Named Entities to determine the reputation of an entity on the basis of the set of events in which it is involved. In “Exploiting Multi-Category Characteristics and Unified Framework to Extract Web Content,” authors propose a unified web content extraction framework that can be applied in various web environments to extract both structured records and text content. In “RDF-F: RDF Datatype Inferring Framework-Towards Better RDF Document Matching,” authors present an RDF Datatype Inferring Framework, called RDF-F, which provides two independent datatype inference processes. In “Discovering Hierarchical Subgraphs of K-Core-Truss,” authors study two useful problems of k-core-truss decomposition and k-core-truss search on graphs.

From the four (extended) papers, we observe that the WISE community is actively engaged in web data processing techniques. We hope that the readers enjoy this special issue.