This special issue presents the extended and revised papers selected from the IEEE 2011 International Conference on e-Business Engineering (ICEBE 2011), which was held in Beijing, China. The ICEBE conference is a prestigious conference which is initiated from 2003 by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Business Informatics and Systems (TCBIS). Among the 119 submissions to ICEBE 2011, 26 papers were accepted as long papers. The accepted papers represent 18 countries and regions around the world, and five continents, including Africa, Europe, America, Australia and Asia. After the conference, a few highly ranked papers were invited to submit their extensions to the Springer Journal \(<\)Service Oriented Computing and Applications\(>\). After two more rounds of rigorous reviews by prestigious researchers, only three papers have been accepted for publication in this special issue.

The selected papers cover the key underlying techniques of building e-business systems, from the service-oriented architecture (SOA) to data mining tools. In the paper titled “Real-time Service Process Admission Control with Schedule Reorganization,” Sen Zhou and Kwei-Jay Lin addressed the problem of resource reservation for applications using the real-time service-oriented architecture (RT-SOA) paradigm. In “QoS Aggregation for Service Orchestrations Based on Workflow Pattern Rules and MCDM Method: Evaluation at Design Time and Runtime,” Nabil Fakhfakh et al. proposed an approach to determine the satisfaction degree corresponding to the QoS of service-based applications, targeting both design time and runtime aggregation of QoS. In “Data Mining for Unemployment Rate Prediction using Search Engine Query Data,” Wei Xu et al. proposed a data mining framework using search engine query data for unemployment rate prediction. Under the framework, a set of data mining tools including neural networks (NNs) and support vector regressions (SVRs) is developed to forecast unemployment trend.

We hope that the collection of papers gives readers a comprehensive view on techniques supporting the business informatics and systems, which help shape the future of IT-transformed consumers, enterprises, governments and markets. We also sincerely thank the reviewers and the journal’s editorial team. Without their effort, we cannot present a high-quality special issue as it is.