This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference, MTSR 2014, held in Karlsruhe, Germany, in November 2014. The 23 full papers and 9 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions. The papers are organized in several sessions and tracks. They cover the following topics: metadata and linked data: tools and models; (meta) data quality assessment and curation; semantic interoperability, ontology-based data access and representation; big data and digital libraries in health, science and technology; metadata and semantics for open repositories, research information systems and data infrastructure; metadata and semantics for cultural collections and applications; semantics for agriculture, food and environment.