Distributed and parallel database technology has been the subject of intense research and development effort. Numerous practical application and commercial products that exploit this technology also exist. Since the mid-1990s, web-based information management has used distributed and/or parallel data management to replace their centralized cousins. The maturation of the field, together with the new issues that are raised by the changes in the underlying technology, requires a central focus for work in the area. Distributed and Parallel Databases provides such a focus for the presentation and dissemination of new research results, systems development efforts, and user experiences in distributed and parallel database systems.

Distributed and Parallel Databases publishes papers in all the traditional as well as most emerging areas of database research, including: Data Integration, Data Sharing, Security and Privacy, Transaction Management, Process and Workflow Management, Information Extraction, Query Processing and Optimization, the Analysis, Mining and Visualization of large data sets, Storage, Data Fragmentation, Placement and Allocation, Replication Protocols, Reliability, Fault Tolerance, Persistence, Preservations, Performance and Scalability, and Use of various communication and dissemination platforms and middleware.

Example sets of issues in the context of distributed and parallel systems include:

    Mobile, Service, P2P, grid and cloud computing for managing data and processes

    Managing Heterogeneity and Autonomy in Distributed Systems

    Semantic interoperability and integration (matching, mapping)

    Linked Data, Open Data, Mobile Data, Streaming Data, Sensor Data, Multimedia and Multimodal Data

    Metadata, Knowledge Bases, Ontologies

    Web scale data management

    Relational, Object-Oriented, XML, Graph, RDF, Event data management

    Supporting Group/Collaborative Work

    Support for Non-Traditional Applications (e.g., Soft Computing applied to Data Processing, Translational medicine exploiting a variety of data)

    Alternative Software and Hardware Architectures Related to Data Management

    The Use of Distributed and Parallel Database Technology in Managing Biological, Geographic, Spatial, Temporal, Scientific and Statistical Data

    System Support and Interface Issues for Data Management