Welcome to the first regular issue in 2015. First, I'd like to take this opportunity to look back on another successful year in 2014 of our journal. 26 papers were published in 4 regular issues with an overall acceptance rate of some 19%. 11 special issues have contributed with a total of 71 papers in a wide range of immerging and highly relevant topics in the field of computer science. Overall, authors from 37 countries from all continents have contributed their novel research in 2014. We are happy to report 112.095 unique visits and approximately 63.000 pdf downloads in 2014. I'd like to thank all institutions, reviewers and authors for their valuable support and work.

I am looking forward to continue the work together with our editors, the editorial team and the technical support to keep up the success of J.UCS. I would be very grateful for suggestions and feedback on how we could even further improve and develop J.UCS in the future. Please consider yourself and encourage your colleagues to submit high-quality articles to our journal. We would also like to further extend our editorial board so if you are a tenured Associate Professor or above with a good publication record, please do apply for a membership in our editorial board. Also, we’d like to extend to J.UCS consortium by further partners from the North American and Asia-Pacific region; please contact me if you and your organization are interested in joining and supporting J.UCS.

In the first regular issues of the year, we have 7 accepted papers from 5 countries from Europe and South America.

In their collaborative research between Spain and Finland, José Luis Gutiérrez-Rivas, Simon Holmbacka, Miguel Méndez-Macías, Wictor Lund, Sébastien Lafond, Johan Lilius and Javier Díaz-Alonso present their solution of a safe motor controller in a mixed-critical environment with runtime updating capabilities.

The authors Henry Hermans, José Janssen, Hubert Vogten and Rob Koper from The Netherlands propose a model for and discuss a first implementation of an educational provisioning system (EPS) that allows for highly flexible provisioning and reduces the workload drastically.

Marcelo G. Manzato, Edson B. Santos Junior and Rudinei Goularte from Brazil proposes a hybrid recommender model which exploits implicit feedback from users by considering not only the latent space of factors that describes the user and item, but also the available metadata associated with content and individuals.

Daniel Pérez-González and Raimundo Díaz-Díaz from Spain focus their research on ICT service provision of 26 Spanish smart cities and the degree of smart development of those cities based on which services are provided.

The authors Mehri Rajaei, Mostafa S. Haghjoo and Eynollah Khanjari Miyaneh from Iran introduces a novel anonymization algorithm for the Social Network Privacy for locating groups keeping in mind privacy and data utility considerations.

Agustín Cañas Rodríguez, Juan M. Santos Gago, Luis E. Anido Rifón and Roberto Pérez Rodríguez from Spain outline in their work a recommender system for non-traditional educational resources based on a semantic approach.

Finally, in a collaborative research between researchers from Spain and Estonia, Guillermo Vega-Gorgojo, Juan I. Asensio-Pérez, Eduardo Gómez-Sánchez, Miguel L. Bote-Lorenzo, Juan A. Muñoz-Cristóbal and Adolfo Ruiz-Calleja contribute with their critical review on recently published scientific literature on Linked Data proposals in the educational field.

Allow me to gratefully thank the members of our editorial board for their effort and support to cover also in this issue such high quality contributions.

Enjoy reading!

Cordially,

Christian Gütl, Managing Editor
Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria
Email: cguetl@iicm.edu