As more and more information becomes available to a growing multitude of people, the ways to access data are rapidly evolving as they must take into consideration, on one front, the kind of data available today and, on the other front, a new population of prospective users.

As an example of the first front, data is scattered among very diverse sources and need to be retrieved, transformed and merged to provide valuable information, while search queries on semi- or totally un-structured data impose novel modelling and access approaches.

On the second front, ranked solutions to keyword-based searches is emerging as the standard paradigm for querying data repositories, while recommendation applications tend even to anticipate user needs by automatically suggesting the information which is most appropriate to the preferences of the users and to the current situation. In addition, the availability of semantic information is increasingly exploited to better understand user intentions.

This need on two opposite fronts has already originated a steadily growing set of proposals of non-conventional ways to access data while inheriting, where possible, the formidable equipment of methods, techniques and methodologies that have been produced in the database field during the last forty years. These new proposals embrace the new challenges, suggesting fresh approaches to data access that rethink fundamentally the traditional information access methods in which SQL queries are posed against a known and rigid schema over a structured database.
Topics of interest

Addressing the above challenges requires understanding the conceptual and formal aspects of non-conventional access to data as well as the practical aspects of its application in real-world scenarios. Relevant topics of the proposed workshop include, but are not limited to, the following:

Context-aware data access
Preference queries
Personalized data access
Schema-agnostic data access
Keyword-search over databases
Provenance-aware data access
Ontology-based data access
Database summarization
Query relaxation
Approximate query-answering
Probabilistic querying
Privacy-preserving data access
Push-based data delivery
Query annotation
Question answering
Natural language querying
Mobile and pervasive data access
Query mediators