Published on behalf of the VLDB Endowment, this journal contains scholarly contributions that examine information system architectures, the impact of technological advancements on information systems, and the development of novel database applications. The VLDB Journal also publishes a number of special issues in addition to the regular ones. One issue of each volume (usually the third) is devoted to selected papers from the previous year's VLDB Conference. Other special issues focus on information that the Editors and the Editorial Board determine to be of importance to the database community, including: - Privacy-Preserving Data Management - Integration of databases and information retrieval - Data Management, Analysis and Mining for the Life Sciences - Data Stream Processing - XML Data Management - E-Services - Databases and the Web - Multimedia Databases.