The papers included in this special issue of the Springer Computing Journal seek to highlight the benefits of Web Information Systems and Technologies for industry and services, in addition to academic applications. This special issue is the result of an open call in combination with inviting authors of a set of selected papers from the 11th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2015) to submit extended papers.

Because the special issue is closely linked to WEBIST, its coverage is linked to the five main tracks of the conference. They cover different aspects of Web Information Systems, including Internet Technology, Web Interfaces and Applications, Society, e-Communities, e-Business, Web Intelligence and Mobile Information Systems.

This special issue received 28 submissions and herewith presents eight research papers with novel concepts and applications in Web Information Systems and Technologies. Each paper was reviewed by at least two experts and the final selection reflects thorough revisions.

This special issue includes the contributions of “Iterated Endorsement Deduction and Ranking” (by Hebert Pérez-Rosés and Francesc Sebé), “CPS: A Dynamic and Distributed Pricing Policy in Cyber Foraging Systems for Fixed State Cloudlets” (by Mayank Tiwary et al.), “An efficient signcryption for data access control in cloud computing” (by Fagen Li et al.), “RDF Approximate Queries Based on Semantic Similarity” (by Li Yan et al.), “A Methodology for Measuring Structure Similarity of Fuzzy XML Documents” (by Zongmin Ma et al.), “Enhanced Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for QoS-aware Web Service Selection Problem” (by Fadl Dahan et al.), “A Model for Evaluating the Security and Usability of E-Banking Platforms” (by Abdulrahman Alarifi et al.) and “They Do! How the Explicit Motive-Structure Predicts User Behavior in (Business-) Social Network Sites like Xing or LinkedIn” (by Jana-Eva Dietel).

We hope that all papers published in this special issue may help the Web Information Systems and Technologies community to find interesting research works. Moreover, we are confident that it underlines how conference discussions can be advanced to journal articles.

We would like to express our thanks to all the authors for their contributions and also to the reviewers who helped us with their expertise and valuable time. Moreover, a word of appreciation for their hard work goes to the Springer staff and the Computing editors, in particular to Priya Balamurugan, Schahram Dustdar and Christine Kamper. Finally, we thank Andreia Pereira and INSTICC for their arduous support in all activities revolving around WEBIST. A special issue of this level is a task that can only be achieved by the collaborative effort of a dedicated and highly capable team.

We hope you enjoy this special issue.