Hi Greg,
I found some more information that can be useful to your cause.
If I understand your project correctly, you want to extract the metadata from the geodatabase and make it available as
informationit's self. ESRI has two products that do that: Metadata Server and Portal Took Kit, they each do it a little
differentlyand use different underlying products. So, perhaps their implementations can help you in planning your
project.The help for both of those products are freely available on line.
As to the fundamental issue of using the metadata stored by the geodatabase, the metadata is ultimately stored as a
blobin one of the geodatabase tables found in the database, to extract or read that blob you will need either ArcObject
oruse the ArcSDE C api. Below, is a link to a short KB article and a link to a discussion forum on the subject.
http://kbplus/kbdoc.asp?dbid=23024
http://forums.esri.com/thread.asp?c=2&f=59&t=110313#314199
Best Wishes,
Kasia