Book excerpt: This two volume set LNCS 6587 and LNCS 6588 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, DASFAA 2011, held in Saarbrücken, Germany, in April 2010. The 53 revised full papers and 12 revised short papers presented together with 2 invited keynote papers, 22 demonstration papers, 4 industrial papers, 8 demo papers, and the abstract of 1 panel discussion, were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 225 submissions. The topics covered are social network, social network and privacy, data mining, probability and uncertainty, stream processing, graph, XML, XML and graph, similarity, searching and digital preservation, spatial queries, query processing, as well as indexing and high performance.