The past decade produced a rich ecosystem of web sites that provide personalized access to (semi-)structured data: financial asset tracking and management sites, personalized news delivery services, and even customized web search engines are all but a few examples. A second wave of innovation has been fueled by the explosive growth of web platforms that enable rich online social interactions, such as online social networks, web communities, wikis, and mashups. These new applications go beyond personalized information access and dissemination. Users can now transcend their role of passive content consumers and engage in content creation, sharing, and various forms of online collaboration as well. This online collaboration has recently moved to the next level through crowdsourcing: applications that enable users to help other users in completing their tasks.

All aforementioned applications rely critically on user-centric data — such as profile data, preferences, activity logs, location, group memberships, and social connections — to provide a personalized experience, including personalized search results, personalized ads, product recommendations, coupons and so forth. Additionally, online social applications provide an unprecedented amount of user-contributed social and context data. The interconnected nature of personalized, social, and contextual data management problems as well as the fertile research ground these represent motivate a discussion on these problems within the database community. We need to obtain a common understanding of new challenges and to collaborate on the design of new models, algorithms, and systems for emerging applications. The PersDB 2013 workshop aims at providing the appropriate venue for discussion and debate of the relevant issues and at nurturing related future research and applications.