Report on the ad-hoc track of the INEX 2005 workshop

The INitiative for the Evaluation of XML retrieval (INEX) has, since 2002, been working towards the goal of establishing an infrastructure, in the form of a large XML test collection and appropriate scoring methods, for the evaluation of content-oriented XML retrieval systems. In 2005, 47 organizations registered to participate in INEX. Throughout the year a number of groups dropped out due to resource requirements, while 11 further groups joined. INEX 2005 concluded with a total of 41 active groups. In addition to the main ad-hoc retrieval track, six further research tracks were included in INEX 2005, each studying different aspects of XML information access: interactive, relevance feedback, heterogeneous, natural language processing, and two new tracks for 2005, multimedia and document mining tracks.