The ultimate goal of many information access systems (e.g., digital libraries, the Web, intranets) is to provide the right content to their end-users. This content is increasingly a mixture of text, multimedia, and metadata, and is formatted according to the adopted -W3C standard for information repositories, the so-called eXtensible Markup L- guage (XML). Whereas many of today's information access systems still treat do- ments as single large (text) blocks, XML offers the opportunity to exploit the internal structure of documents in order to allow for more precise access thus providing more specific answers to user requests. Providing effective access to XML-based content is therefore a key issue for the success of these systems. The aim of the INEX campaign (Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval), which was set up at the beginning of 2002, is to establish infrastructures, XML test suites, and appropriate measurements for evaluating the performance of information retrieval systems that aim at giving effective access to XML content. More precisely, the goal of the INEX initiative is to provide means, in the form of a large XML test collection and appropriate scoring methods, for the evaluation of content-oriented XML retrieval systems.

Overview of INEX 2004.- Overview of INEX 2004.- Methodology.- Narrowed Extended XPath I (NEXI).- NEXI, Now and Next.- If INEX Is the Answer, What Is the Question?.- Reliability Tests for the XCG and inex-2002 Metrics.- Ad Hoc Retrieval.- Component Ranking and Automatic Query Refinement for XML Retrieval.- MultiText Experiments for INEX 2004.- Logic-Based XML Information Retrieval for Determining the Best Element to Retrieve.- An Algebra for Structured Queries in Bayesian Networks.- IR of XML Documents - A Collective Ranking Strategy.- TRIX 2004 - Struggling with the Overlap.- The Utrecht Blend: Basic Ingredients for an XML Retrieval System.- Hybrid XML Retrieval Revisited.- Analyzing the Properties of XML Fragments Decomposed from the INEX Document Collection.- A Voting Method for XML Retrieval.- Mixture Models, Overlap, and Structural Hints in XML Element Retrieval.- GPX - Gardens Point XML Information Retrieval at INEX 2004.- Hierarchical Language Models for XML Component Retrieval.- Ranked Retrieval of Structured Documents with the S-Term Vector Space Model.- Merging XML Indices.- DocBase - The INEX Evaluation Experience.- Ad Hoc Retrieval and Relevance Feedback.- TIJAH at INEX 2004 Modeling Phrases and Relevance Feedback.- Flexible Retrieval Based on the Vector Space Model.- Relevance Feedback.- Relevance Feedback for XML Retrieval.- Ad Hoc Retrieval and Heterogeneous Document Collection.- A Universal Model for XML Information Retrieval.- Cheshire II at INEX '04: Fusion and Feedback for the Adhoc and Heterogeneous Tracks.- Using a Relevance Propagation Method for Adhoc and Heterogeneous Tracks at INEX 2004.- Heterogeneous Document Collection.- Building and Experimenting with a Heterogeneous Collection.- A Test Platform for the INEX Heterogeneous Track.-EXTIRP 2004: Towards Heterogeneity.- Natural Language Processing of Topics.- NLPX at INEX 2004.- Analysing Natural Language Queries at INEX 2004.- Interactive Studies.- The Interactive Track at INEX 2004.- Interactive Searching Behavior with Structured XML Documents.