Abstract: The goal of searching XML documents is to identify XML documents which best match users information needs. At first glance, this seems very simple because XML structure resembles a database. Hence, searching is merely to identify XML documents which contain the tags and words which are also contained in the user`s query. However, this is not completely true without having a collaborative ontology, a query expansion mechanism and query relaxation techniques. This article highlights those issues and presents an integral approach for searching XML documents. A Java-based software prototype for the integral approach is built within a collaborative environment to demonstrate the validity of the approach.