Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, FQAS 2009, held in Roskilde, Denmark, in October 2009. The 57 papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 submissions. They are structured in topical sections on database management, information retrieval, extraction and mining, ontologies and semantic web, intelligent information extraction from texts, advances in fuzzy querying, personalization, preferences, context and recommendation, and Web as a stream.