Dear Readers,

This issue is a nice potpourri of five papers coming from (in alphabetical order) Austria, Barbados, Kuwait, Taiwan and Tunisia, but not just a geographical medley, but also one if you look at the topics. The Austrian paper deals with the hot topic of electronic communities in a fairly comprehensive fashion; the Barbados paper treats the mutual exclusion problem; the paper from Kuwait is very much on the borderline of computer science and statistics/mathematics; the Taiwan paper addresses some very applied problems in large companies while the paper from Tunesia deals with new aspects of liveness in Petri nets. Thus, although this is one of the thinner issues of J.UCS, I think most of you will find one (and probably only one) of the papers of interest to you. Finally, because of the variety of topics presented in the papers, this issue is generally accessible in order to give prospective readers and subscribers an impression of the scope of articles published in our journal.

Thus: happy reading! Do consider J.UCS also in future for publication of your best results. After all, J.UCS is now in its 12th year... and hence the oldest and probably most successfull electronic journal where the 12 issues also appear in printed form for archival purposes. If you have not convinced your group to subscribe for a small amount for your whole group (company or campus or such), it might be time to do so!

Cordially,
Hermann Maurer