The JBoss DNA federated repository will also support queries against the integrated and unified graph. In some situations the query can be determined to apply to a single source, but in most situations the query must be planned (and possibly rewritten) such that it can be pushed down to all the appropriate sources. Also, the cached results must be consulted prior to returning the query results, as the results from one source might have contributions from another source.

Searching the whole federated repository is also important. This allows users to simply supply a handful of search terms, and to get results that are ranked based upon how close each result is to the search terms. (Searching is very different from querying, which involves specifying the exact semantics of what is to be searched and how the information is to be compared.) JBoss DNA will incorporate a search engine (e.g., likely to be Lucene) and will populate the engine's indexes using the federated content and the cached information. Notifications of changing information will be reflected in the indexes, but some sources may want to explicitly allow or disallow periodic crawling of their content.