Metadata & Information Management Issues in XML-Based Mediation

The advancement in XML-based mediation has made a significant impact on the area of resource discovery. Search engines have now been provided with new ways to improve resource discovery and new tools to customise resulting content. In the early days of XML, this work was undertaken within the context of the European funded project GESTALT (Getting Educational System Talk Across Leading Edge Technologies). Building on this experience, new improvement came from the European funded project GUARDIANS (Gateway for User Access to Remote Distributed Information And Network Services). However, due to the lack of support for native XML databases and XML querying languages, search facilities were limited. This paper builds upon the achievements of both projects and proposes a solution for XML querying in XQuery.