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.