Hummingbird Communications Ltd. unveiled its metadata strategy and announced Genio MetaExplorer. A fully customizable, Web-based solution, MetaExplorer is designed to support the information search and analytical needs of information consumers by providing access to all decision support metadata repositories within an organization. At the heart of MetaExplorer is MetaData Server, an intelligent middle-tier solution with a driver-based, plug-and-play architecture. MetaData Server enables dynamic access to the rich variety of decision support metadata stored within the enterprise. Hummingbird will provide drivers to access the leading industry metadata repositories in addition to providing APIs to build drivers for accessing other metadata repositories. Complementing MetaExplorer and MetaData Server, is the new Hummingbird Enterprise Repository (HERO) that leverages XML-enabled metadata access and interchange. With HERO, organizations can now move to a common repository of metadata that provides the architectural glue that binds together the various components of the enterprise intelligence environment. HERO will simplify deployment, improve scalability to an enterprise scale, reduce integration challenges, and ease the maintenance burden to reduce the total cost of ownership. Genio MetaExplorer is expected to be available in Q1 2000. www.hummingbird.com