ixml for converting xpath into xml?

At this point I'm in two boats:
1) I'm trying to figure out ixml in general and where I can apply it.  I've
got this nagging brain-loop that I'll be able to use it for really cool
stuff once I've got it figured out,
2) I have had a long standing wish that I could view/use/manipulate an
alternative xpath structure composed in xml (ie, so that all pieces of the
xpath expression are individually addressable/queryable like attributes and
text nodes)  ie, if I could preprocess and xslt stylesheet and wherever
there's an @select attribute or @match attribute, place a parsed structure
underneath it in its own namespace, I'd be able to rationalize a bit about
the elements I'm going to be processing with each template.

I'm not sure that makes sense on a re-read.. so here's a
not-remotely-suggestive example.. maybe a super simple case would be:
<xsl:template match="foo"/>
and I'd like to see that as:
<xsl:template match="foo">
  <ixmlxpath:expression>
     <ixmlxpath:context-child-element name="foo"/>
  </ixmlxpath:expression>
</xsl:template>

With that kind of thing, I'd be able to preprocess my templates that
operate on 'foo' elements without having to say things like "awkwardly
half-parse this xpath expression and see if it references foo in an obvious
way".

Does this question make sense, and does iXML make efforts in that direction
potentially fruitful for my purposes, or am I barking up the wrong tree?