We are pleased to present a special issue of Data Science and Engineering (DSE), which contains a collection of five papers from the WISE 2019 conference, and two regular submission papers.

The International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE) has established itself as a community aiming at high-quality research and offering the ground for advancing efforts in topics related to Web information systems. WISE 2019 focuses on research, development, and applications in relation to Web information systems, including a wide range of topics, such as blockchain, deep learning, machine learning, recommender systems, data mining, Web-based applications, graph learning, knowledge graphs, graph mining, text mining, and crowdsourcing. WISE 2019 was held in Hong Kong, China, during January 19–21, 2020. WISE 2019 attracted a total of 211 research paper submissions. The conference program committee selected 50 full research papers (with an acceptance rate of 23.7%), five demonstration papers, and three tutorial papers to be presented at the conference and published in the proceedings [1, 2]. The conference program also included keynote presentations by Prof. Wei Zhao (American University of Sharjah, UAE) and Prof. Weiyi Meng (State University of New York at Binghamton, USA).

The five extended papers for this special issue were selected from among all the accepted papers by the special issue guest editors Reynold Cheng, Sibo Wang, Wen Hua, and Xin Huang, 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 of adding 30% new materials. The revised papers again went through the review process in accordance with DSE guidelines and are finally presented to the readers in the present form.

The five extended papers in this special issue cover a variety of topics related to data science and engineering. The first paper “Feature-Based and Adaptive Rule Adaptation in Dynamic Environments” presented an autonomic and conceptual approach to adapt data annotation rules in unstructured and changing environments. The second paper “Real-Time Influence Maximization in a RTB Setting” proposed a real-time influence maximization approach to make influence maximization decisions within a real-time bidding environment. The third paper “Integrating Web-based Collaborative Live Editing and Wireframing into a Model-Driven Web Engineering Process” proposed a model-driven Web engineering approach for microservice-based Web applications, which integrates the live code editing and wireframing capabilities. The fourth paper “An Interactive Network for End-to-end Review Helpfulness Modeling” proposed TRI, a deep interactive architecture to learn the text-rating interaction for end-to-end review helpfulness modeling. The last paper “Co-purchaser Recommendation for Online Group Buying” presented network embedding-based methods to address the co-purchaser recommendation for online group buying.

We hope that the readers enjoy this special issue. We would like to acknowledge the work done by all the authors and their willingness to contribute their papers to this special issue. We thank all the reviewers for their expert comments and assistance in timely reviews. Finally, a note of thanks is to DSE Editors-in-Chief X. Sean Wang and Timos Sellis for their guidance and support in this process.

Reynold Cheng

Sibo Wang

Wen Hua

Xin Huang