XML indexing/search engine

["Roth, Scott (ITD)" <Scott.Roth@state.ma.us>]

Hi - 

I am starting to design an application that will be a calendaring/event engine for the State of Massachusetts and all of its agencies (Department of Public Health, Registry of Motor Vehicles, etc...).  We plan on putting an appropriate calendar event schema in place, and then starting to generate 1 XML file per event (public hearing, course, forum, workshop, whatever...).  This will build up quite a large amount of small XML files quickly.  My question is this - what is the best way to store these files for easy indexing and searching?  The actual files will be stored in our content management system, so I am not worried about updating the information - merely being able to efficiently query the collection.  Apache's Xindice seems to be the frontrunner so far.  I am envisioning storing the collection in Xindice and returning a nodeset to my XSL that contains file names that match whatever the query was.  The XSL is then free to iterate through each matching file using the document function and grab whatever information for display that the current page requires.  Is there other software that I should be considering?  Other approaches?

I am anxious to get this right, as this will be the model for other statewide templatizing applications - for example, press releases.

--
Scott Roth
scott.roth@state.ma.us
http://www.mass.gov