Research on database and information system technologies has been rapidly evolving over the last few years. Advances concern either new data types, new management issues, and new kind of architectures and systems. The 17th East-European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS 2013), held on September 1–4, 2013 in Genova, Italy, and associated satellite events aimed at covering some emerging issues concerning such new trends in database and information system research. The aim of this paper is to present such events, their motivations and topics of interest, as well as briefly outline the papers selected for presentations. The selected papers will then be included in the remainder of this voume.