This volume contains the proceedings of the eleventh British
National Conference on Databases, held at Keele University,
England. A dominant themein the volume is the provision of
the means to enhance the capabilities of databases to handle
information that has a rich semantic structure. A major
research question is how to achieve such a semantic scale-up
without sacrificing performance. There are currently two
main paradigms within which it is possible to propose
answers to this question, deduction-oriented and
object-oriented. Both paradigms are well represented in this
collection, with the balance in the direction of the
deductive approach, which is followed by both the invited
papers, by Michael Freeston from the European
Computer-Industry Research Centre in Munich and Carlo
Zaniolo from the University of California at Los Angeles. In
addition, the volume contains 13 full papers selected from a
total of36 submissions.