Starting a XMLNews project

Hi All,

We are trying to create an electronic archive of local news article from various local newspaper in Hong Kong. I read the XMLNews turtorials and find that it is an execellent framework for our project. We shall use it to encode the information in our project. The plan is as followed:

1) We need to write an editor application to mark up the news. 
    a) Import the news as plain text document into the application.
    b) Allow the user to create metadata for the news. The metadata will be created with a fill-in-the-blank method.
    c) Let the user create inline markup for the news content. 
    d) Maintain a database of common terms for different entities of the news. For example, a list of persons and their attributes will be stored in a database. So we can instruct the application to automatically markup the common terms with a piece of news.
    e) Import pictures into the markup news.

2) We need to have another tools to transform the XMLNews article into HTML format. Does anyone have a suggestion of what we can use? Is XSL a good choice? Is there some actual examples of how this can be done? 

3) We need to develop a query method to search for this news. Is there a query mechanism for XMLNews defined? If not, can anyone give me some pointer of designing the query language. If possible, I would like to develop a way similar to a natural language query. I will be more user friendly and allow the user more flexibility.

That's about it for now. If you know anybody who already have some of these implemented, we would be very interested to have a look. If there is something available, we don't want to reinvent them from scratch.

Any help, idea, advise is much appreciated.

Best regards,
Simon Lee
Email: simenlee@hkstar.com