International Workshop on Evolution and Change in Data Management and on Non Conventional Data Access (ECDM - NoCoDa 2012)

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.