Special Issue on Discovery Science: Guest Editor's Introduction.

This special issue focuses on Discovery Science (DS), which is a scientific discipline on any discovery process that is mainly approached by computer science. DS first started as a national project in Japan involving more than 100 researchers in 1998 and the project gave birth to a series of international conferences on DS, which have been held successfully every year since 1998. The objective of this special issue is to provide a leading forum for timely, in-depth presentation of recent advances in algorithms, theories and applications in the field of DS. Seven papers, ranging in a spectrum from basic theoretical research to solid application research, are included in this special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]