Second edition of the "XML and information retrieval" workshop held at SIGIR'2002, Tampere, Finland, Aug 15th, 2002

The previous workshop on "XML and Information Retrieval" was held in the context of SIGIR'2000 (Athens, Greece) and showed that there is a serious interest in managing semi-structured data from an IR (i.e., unstructured) perspective rather than from the dominating database (i.e., structured) perspective. As a direct outcome of the workshop, a special JASIS issue on XML and IR was edited and published in March 2002. The topic is still in its prime both in the Academia, as evidenced by XML related papers presented at SIGIR'2001, and in the business world with more search engines adding "XML support" as a requirement.The purpose of this workshop was to continue the effort of applying an "IR approach" to XML search and retrieval. We believe that this approach is crucial to extending the role of XML from pure data exchange in business-to-business applications to actual information exchange in end-users facing and Knowledge Management applications. As a side issue, we also intended to ask the IR community how it should relate, if at all, to the XQuery initiative at W3C. The workshop included 3 presentation sessions, for a total of 8 reviewed papers, an invited talk and a panel. The workshop attracted an audience of more than 30 people, who were encouraged to interact with the speakers as well as the audience.