Welcome to the proceedings of the 8th Workshop of the Initiative for the Eva- ation of XML
Retrieval (INEX)! Now in its eighth year INEX is an established evaluation forum for XML
information retrieval (IR) with over 100 organi- tions worldwide registered and over 50 groups
participating actively in at least one of the tracks. INEX aims to provide an infrastructure
in the form of a large structured test collection and appropriate scoring methods for the
evaluation of focused retrieval systems. XML IR plays an increasingly important role in many
information access systems (e.g. digitallibraries Web intranet) where content is a mixture
oftext multimedia and metadata formatted according to the adopted W3C standard for
information repositories the so-called eXtensible Markup Language (XML). The ultimate goal of
such systems is to provide the right content to their e- users. However while many of today s
information access systems still treat documents as single large (text) blocks XML o?ers the
opportunity to exploit the internal structure of documents in order to allow for more precise
access thus providing more speci?c answers to user requests. Providing e?ective access to
XML-based content is therefore a key issue for the success of these systems.
INEX2009wasanexcitingyearforINEXinwhichanewcollectionwasint- duced that is again based on
Wikipedia but is more than four times larger with
longerarticlesandadditionalsemanticannotation.Intotal eightresearchtracks were included which
studied di?erent aspects of focused information access: Ad Hoc Track
investigatedthee?ectivenessofXML-IRandPassageRetrieval for four ad hoc retrievaltasks:Thorough
Focused Relevant in Context and Best in Context.
