Foreword

Proliferation of database-driven web sites has brought upon a plethora of information access and dissemination applications. Monitoring and trading stock portfolios, news notification, weather tracking, and even simple search are just a few examples. In addition, recently, new applications have emerged that go beyond information access and dissemination and enhance creativity, information sharing, and collaboration among users providing richer interaction possibilities. Now, users cannot only access content but they can also generate, share and modify content (both theirs and others') freely, compose their applications, enhance their interface, etc. Web-based communities, wikis, social networks, mashups, folksonomies are some of the emerging new applications. In all these (classical and novel) applications, different notions of user information, such as preferences, community memberships and social interactions, and context information, such as a user's social network, location, time, and other features of a user's environment, are of paramount importance in order to improve and personalize user experience. In this context, new challenges emerge for user-centric, context-aware database systems for storing and managing different aspects of user and context information, for data management and computing taking into account personal, social and contextual information about users and for customizability of their behavior.

User-centric, personalized, socially-affected, and context-aware database systems represent a remarkable step towards user-centric applications that allow users to find, generate, share and modify content and services. It is imperative that people studying and working on the different components of a database system clarify their view of contextualization and personalization and describe the ways and degree to which these can be applied to their components of interest. We need a common understanding of the new challenges and we need to design new models, new algorithms, new database to count for the user-centric requirements of emerging applications.

The PersDB 2010 workshop aims at providing a forum for presentation of the latest research results, new technology developments, and new applications in the areas of personalized/socialized access, profile management, and context awareness in database systems.