BNCOD has, for the past 27 years, provided a forum for researchers world-wide to gather to discuss the topical issues in database research. As the research challenges have evolved, so BNCOD has changed its topics of interest accordingly, now covering data management more widely. In doing so, it has evolved from a local conference mostly attended by British researchers to a truly international conference that happens to be held in Britain. This year, for instance, significantly less than half of the presentations are from UK or Irish authors, other contributions coming from continental Europe, Asia and the USA. Currently, one of the most pressing challenges is to ?nd ways of evolving database technology to cope with its new role in underpinning the massively distributed and heterogeneous applications built on top of the Internet. This has affected both the ways in which data has been accessed and the ways in which it is represented, with XML data management becoming an important issue and, as such, heavily represented at this conference. It has also brought back issues of performance that might have been considered largely solved by the improvements in hardware, since data now has to be managed on devices of low power and small memory as well as on standard client and powerful server machines. We therefore invited papers on all aspects of data management, particularly related to how data is used in the ubiquitous environment of the modern Internet by complex distributed and scientific applications. Of the 56 submissions from 14 countries we selected 15 full papers, 3 short papers and 7 posters for presentation, all of which appear in this volume along with 2 invited papers.