This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 36th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, MFCS 2011, held in Warsaw, Poland, in August 2011. The 48 revised full papers presented together with 6 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 129 submissions. Topics covered include algorithmic game theory, algorithmic learning theory, algorithms and data structures, automata, grammars and formal languages, bioinformatics, complexity, computational geometry, computer-assisted reasoning, concurrency theory, cryptography and security, databases and knowledge-based systems, formal specifications and program development, foundations of computing, logic in computer science, mobile computing, models of computation, networks, parallel and distributed computing, quantum computing, semantics and verification of programs, and theoretical issues in artificial intelligence.

Data exchange is the problem of finding an instance of a target schema, given an instance of a source schema and a specification of the relationship between the source and the target. Such a target instance should correctly represent information from the source instance under the constraints imposed by the target schema, and it should allow one to evaluate queries on the target instance in a way that is semantically consistent with the source data. Data exchange is an old problem that re-emerged as an active research topic recently, due to the increased need for exchange of data in various formats, often in e-business applications. In this lecture, we give an overview of the basic concepts of data exchange in both relational and XML contexts. We give examples of data exchange problems, and we introduce the main tasks that need to addressed. We then discuss relational data exchange, concentrating on issues such as relational schema mappings, materializing target instances (including canonical solutions and cores), query answering, and query rewriting. After that, we discuss metadata management, i.e., handling schema mappings themselves. We pay particular attention to operations on schema mappings, such as composition and inverse. Finally, we describe both data exchange and metadata management in the context of XML. We use mappings based on transforming tree patterns, and we show that they lead to a host of new problems that did not arise in the relational case, but they need to be addressed for XML. These include consistency issues for mappings and schemas, as well as imposing tighter restrictions on mappings and queries to achieve tractable query answering in data exchange. Table of Contents: Overview / Relational Mappings and Data Exchange / Metadata Management / XML Mappings and Data Exchange

The problem of exchanging data between different databases with different schemas is an area of immense importance. Consequently data exchange has been one of the most active research topics in databases over the past decade. Foundational questions related to data exchange largely revolve around three key problems: how to build target solutions; how to answer queries over target solutions; and how to manipulate schema mappings themselves? The last question is also known under the name 'metadata management', since mappings represent metadata, rather than data in the database. In this book the authors summarize the key developments of a decade of research. Part I introduces the problem of data exchange via examples, both relational and XML; Part II deals with exchanging relational data; Part III focuses on exchanging XML data; and Part IV covers metadata management.