The Annual Workshops "Advances in Databases and Information Systems" (ADBIS) were founded by the Moscow ACM SIGMOD Chapter in 1993. In 1993 - 1996 these Workshops were held as the Workshops of the Moscow ACM SIGMOD Chapter in collaboration with the Russian Foundation for Basic Research. International body of the Program Committees and well-organized paper selection process contributed to the quality of the Conferences. In 1996 after series of discussions with Dr. Won Kim (at that time, the ACM SIGMOD Chair) it was agreed to transform ADBIS into the East European Conference. The objective ADBIS as the East-European Symposium is to constitute a forum for the exchange of scientific achievements between the research communities of Eastern Europe and the rest of the world in the area of databases and information systems. ADBIS is intended to promote research and development of data bases and information systems by:

• providing a conference for the introduction and discussion of emerging and innovative approaches through which advanced information systems (IS) and system-level functions can be developed within the distinct frameworks;
• providing the research community exposure to the information systems performance issues, their reliability, architectures and applications, progress in their design, implementation and deployment technologies;
• emphasizing discussions of the emerging theories, computational principles, technologies and architectures within which novel principles and techniques can be developed and applied to address practical issues for large- and middle-scaled information systems;
• providing practicing engineers exposure to and an evaluation of evolving research, tools, and practices;
• encouraging the exchange of database and information systems technologies and experience.

This symposium attempts to meet the needs of a large and diverse constituency, which includes practitioners, researchers, educators, and users. The focus of the conference is on various aspects of database and information systems that include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• Architecture of information systems;
• Object-oriented and computational models;
• Ontological modeling and specification;
• Enterprise Modeling;
• Requirements engineering;
• Design engineering;
• Re-engineering and legacy systems;
• Methodologies and tools;
• Activity modelling and advanced transaction and workflow models;
• Data Warehousing;
• Parallel and distributed databases;
• Deductive and object-oriented databases;
• Data mining, knowledge discovery and knowledge bases;
• Interfaces to databases and information systems;
• Novel database application areas;
• Scientific databases and information systems;
• Large area information systems on the Internet;
• Multimedia information systems;
• Interoperable, heterogeneous environments and systems;
• Semantic interoperability, megaprogramming and reuse.

In 1997 - 2000 four East European ADBIS Conferences took place in St. Petersburg (Russia), Poznan (Poland), Maribor (Slovenia), Prague (Czech Republic). The conference in Prague was the first experience extending ADBIS into cooperation with DASFAA - one of the most prestigeous international DB conferences held in Asia and Australia.

ADBIS is managed by a Steering Committee, a Conference Organizing Committee, and a Program Committee. The ADBIS Steering Committee includes representatives from different countries of the Eastern and Central Europe: Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Greece, Estonia, Germany, Jugoslavia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine.