Focused Access to XML Documents

Welcome to the proceedings of the 6th workshop of the Initiative for the Ev- uation of XML Retrieval (INEX)! Now in its sixth year, INEX has become an established evaluation forum for XML information retrieval (IR), with over 100 participating organizations worldwide. Its aim is to provide an infrastructure, in the form of a large XML test collection and appropriate scoring methods, for the evaluation of XML IR systems. XMLIRis playinganincreasinglyimportantroleinmanyinformationaccess systems(e.g.,digitallibraries,web,intranet)wherecontentisbecomingmoreand more a mixture of text, multimedia, and metadata, formatted according to the adopted W3C standard for information repositories, the so-called eXtensible MarkupLanguage(XML).Theultimategoalofsuchsystemsistoprovidetheright contenttotheirend-users.However,whilemanyoftoday'sinformationaccesss- temsstilltreatdocumentsassinglelarge(text)blocks,XMLo?erstheopportunity toexploittheinternalstructureofdocumentsinordertoallowformoreprecise- cess,thusprovidingmorespeci?canswerstouserrequests.Providinge?ective- cesstoXML-basedcontentisthereforeakeyissueforthesuccessofthesesystems. The aim of the INEX 2007 workshop was to bring together researchers in the ?eld of XML IR who participated in the INEX 2007 campaign. During the past year 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 brought together the results of this lar- scale e?ort, summarized and addressed the issues encountered, and devised a work plan for the future evaluation of XML retrieval systems. In total sevenresearchtrackswereincluded in INEX 2007.Thesestudied d- ferentaspectsofXMLinformationaccess:ad-hoc,documentmining,multimedia, heterogeneous,entity ranking,book search,and link-the-wiki. The consolidation of the existing tracks, and the expansion to new areas o?ered by the new tracks has enabled INEX to extend its scope. This volume contains 37 papers selected from 50 submitted ones (74% acceptance rate). Each paper was peer-reviewed.