Standard(s) for client-side definition of advanced search?

Question

Is there some kind of established standard or search-meta-language for defining advanced search? Some defined standard for the use of wildcards, logical operators, labels or categories etc.?

Something like Googles possibility to use "OR", "+" etc for logical definitions, "label:news" for specifying a category etc.?

(This client-side "meta-language" will later be translated to an server-side sql query. If there are established solutions for this translations, that's of course interesting too!)

Answer 1

Doesn't seem to have open-source to-SQL conversion libraries in abundance, but maybe CQL would work for you? http://zing.z3950.org/cql/intro.html