The explosion of digital data created by mobile sensors, social media, surveillance, medical imaging, smart grids and the like—combined with new tools for analyzing it all—has brought us a Big Data era. We are facing the great challenges: how to deal with data which is more than we could actually understand and absorb and how to make efficient use of the huge volume of data? From both scientific and practical perspectives, research on "Data Science" goes beyond the contents of Big Data. Data Science can be generally regarded as an interdisciplinary field of using mathematics, statistics, databases, data mining, high-performance computing, knowledge management and virtualization to discover knowledge from data. It should have its own scientific contents, such as axioms, laws and rules, which are fundamentally important for experts in different fields to explore their own interests from data.

The "International symposium/workshop on Dataology and Data Science" has been a platform for researchers from data and some practitioners from industry and government to share their ideas, research results and experiences on studying of data. From 2010 to 2013, it has been annually held in China where more than 300 scholars and industrial professionals from Australia, Canada, China, Japan, UK and USA attended.

The Third International Conference on Data Science (ICDS 2016) will be held at Xi'an, China, July 23-24, 2016. The theme of ICDS 2016 is: "Data Science and Applications".