I write with pleasurethis forewordto the proceedings of the 7th workshopof the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval (INEX). The increased adoption of XML as the standard for representing a document structure has led to the development of retrieval systems that are aimed at e?ectively accessing XML documents. Providing e?ective access to large collections of XML documents is therefore a key issue for the success of these systems. INEX aims to provide the necessary methodological means and worldwide infrastructures for evaluating how good XML retrieval systems are. Since its launch in 2002, INEX has grown both in terms of number of p- ticipants and its coverage of the investigated retrieval tasks and scenarios. In 2002, INEX started with 49 registered participating organizations, whereas this number was more than 100 for 2008. In 2002, there was one main track, c- cerned with the ad hoc retrieval task, whereas in 2008, seven tracks in addition to the main ad hoc track were investigated, looking at various aspects of XML retrieval, from book search to entity ranking, including interaction aspects.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 7th International Workshop of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval, INEX 2008, held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in December 2008.
The aim of the INEX 2008 workshop was to bring together researchers who participated in the INEX 2008 campaign. Over the year leading up to the event, participating organizations contributed to the building of a large-scale XML test collection by creating topics, performing retrieval runs, and providing relevance assessments. The workshop concluded the results of this large-scale effort, summarized and addressed the issues encountered, and devised a work plan for the future evaluation of XML retrieval systems. The 49 papers included in this volume report the final results of INEX 2008. They have been divided into sections according to the seven tracks of the workshop, investigating various aspects of XML retrieval, from book search to entity ranking, including interaction aspects.