Data whose structure is irregular and whose schema is either nonexistent or rapidly evolving is often refered to as semistructured data. The topic of modeling and querying semistructured data has recently received significant attention due to its application to data integration, querying and management of structured documents and scientific data and web-site management. In this talk I will describe the resarch issues that arise in bringing semistructured data to practice in the context of two applications: web-site management and the management of XML data. In particular, I will touch on the issues of query optimization for semistructured data and designing an appropriate langauge for querying XML data.