International audienceThe amount of structured content published on the Web has been growing rapidly, making it possible to address increasingly complex information access tasks. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of large scale human-curated knowledge bases as well as a growing array of techniques that identify or extract information automatically from unstructured and semi-structured sources. The ESAIR workshop series aims to advance the general research agenda on the problem of creating and exploiting semantic annotations. The eighth edition of ESAIR took place at CIKM 2015 in Melbourne, Australia, on the 23rd of October. Having a special focus on applications, we dedicated an " annotations in action " track to demonstrations that showcase innovative prototype systems, in addition to the regular research and position paper contributions. The workshop also featured invited talks from leaders in the field. This report presents an overview of the event and its major outcomes