About the Workshop

Traditionally, the database research community has focused on methodologies, techniques, and technologies for data management to support and enable business activities. Yet, in the last couple of decades this equilibrium has been completely overturned, as data-management research and development problems became part of every individual and collective activity in our society. New ways of representing information require equally new approaches and technologies for its storage and processing: examples of these range from multimedia data streams and storage systems to semantic-web knowledge linked all over the Web, and from scientific time series to natural language information that has to be understood by software programs. Therefore, a data-centric vision of the world is actually key for advancing in such a demanding scenario, where two orthogonal phenomena take place: on the one hand, rather than storing, managing and analyzing only the current state of the information we are forced to deal with the management of information change; on the other hand, the new ways to access data must take into consideration the kind of data available today and a new population of prospective users.

The ECDM–NoCoDa Workshop addresses these issues in the following two tracks, bringing together researchers and practitioners from the more established research areas as well as from emerging, visionary ones.

• Evolution and Change in Data Management (ECDM): change is a fundamental but sometimes neglected aspect of information management. The management of evolution and change and the ability for data and knowledge-based systems to deal with change is an essential component in developing and maintaining truly useful systems that minimize service disruption and down time and maximize availability of data and applications. Many approaches to handling evolution and change have been proposed in various areas of data management and this workshop will deal with the manner in which change can be handled, and the semantics of evolving data, metadata and their structure in computer based systems.
• Non Conventional Data Access (NoCoDa): as more and more data become available to a growing multitude of people, the ways to access them are rapidly evolving, originating a steadily growing set of proposals of non-conventional ways for data access while inheriting, where possible, the formidable equipment of methods, techniques and methodologies that have been produced during the last forty years. These new proposals embrace the new challenges, suggesting fresh approaches to data access that rethink the traditional information access methods in which queries are posed against a known and rigid schema over a structured database. This workshop will contribute advances on the conceptual and semantic aspects of non-conventional methods for data access and on their practical application to modern data and knowledge management.