The 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, with a renewed group of organizers, sets its focus on applications. The desired result of the workshop is a roadmap and research agenda that guides academic efforts and aligns them with industrial directions and developments.