Editorial message: special track on information access and retrieval

There is a growing need to access and retrieve relevant information across media, across languages and across modalities. The research context concerning information access and retrieval aims at modelling, designing and implementing systems able to provide a fast and effective content-based access to a large amount of multimedia information. The aim of such systems is to estimate the relevance of documents to a user information need. This is a very hard and complex task due to several distinct reasons that a large volume of research has attempted to analyse and tackle. Information Retrieval (IR) can be considered as the first historical research area aimed at defining systems for the automatic access to huge amounts of information (together with DBMSs whose main aim is to manage and access huge amounts of data).