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.,...