Third edition of the "XML and information retrieval" workshop first workshop on integration of IR and DB (WIRD) jointly held at SIGIR'2004, Sheffield, UK, July 29^th, 2004

The morning session was dedicated to the third edition in the series of XML and Information Retrieval workshops that were held at SIGIR'2000 (Athens, Greece, see SIGIR Forum Fall 2000 issue) and SIGIR'2002 (Tampere, Finland, see SIGIR Forum Fall 2002 issue). The goal of the workshop, co-chaired by Baeza-Yates and Maarek, was to complement the INEX (Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval) meetings that have been organized for the last two years, by providing researchers a useful forum for discussing (before implementing) and evaluating their models at INEX in the second half of the year. Our intent was twofold: first encourage the exchanges of ideas between researchers who are now active in this "sub-field" and, second, attract new interests. Our focus, like in previous editions of the workshop, was to address issues related to the application of IR methods to XML data for querying, retrieval, navigating, etc. We have gone a long way since the first edition in 2000, when XML was entirely dominated by the DB community. However, it seems that the expected breakthrough has not occurred yet, and it is not clear whether it is for lack of XML data, of appropriate technology, or simply of real needs in the marketplace.