---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 17:50:54 -0700 (PDT) From: Ernesto Giralt This is the announcement of the publication of the first version (1,0 beta) of DescribeThis (http://www.describethis.com), a service designed for the automatic extraction of metadata from online resources. The site offers an easy to use interface where you can indicate the resource to analyze and how to download the results as XML, XHTML or RDF files. In the current version (1.0 BETA), the site's engine is able to find the resources to process using keywords, full URLs or more complex queries with operators, like "ISBN", used to collect the bibliographic data for published documents (see http://www.describethis.com/help/search.html). In the first case it works as a metasearch engine using other search engines to locate the best sites where the resource can be found. The results returned back contains all the recognized and generated Dublin Core elements for the requested resource and can be downloaded as RDF, XML or XHTML collections. DescribeThis's main fields of applications : - To support and extend the application and development of the Dublin Core format as one of most appropriate metadata standards to describe or catalog resources, digitals or not. - To use the site as a tool to support the cataloguing of online resources, oriented to information specialists and Internet users in general. - To deliver services of automatic metadata management, designed for managers of bibliographic and content databases. - To create an efficient way for administrators and website authors to dynamically provide metadata information about their sites to page crawlers, bots, spiders, agents, worms and other automatic indexing and site classification systems, with the aim of contributing to the improvement of the whole Internet content organization. In the describethis.com front page you can find several samples to illustrate the normal operation of the service. About Dublin Core Services ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ DescribeThis is a gateway to the functions of analysis, automatic conversion and filtration of digital resources and formats, included as part of a group of web services and tools called Sand Dublin Core Services (DCS). DCS provides support and software infrastructure to develop metadata management applications and services In this version, DCS can automatically analyze and to generate metadata registers for the following formats: - HTML and XHTML Documents - Dublin Core/RDF - Dublin Core/XML - Dublin Core/HTML (META tags) - GIF, JPG (EXIF) and other image formats - RSS - bibTex - proprietary Formats XML (ex.: Amazon XML Web Services) Support for other well-known formats like PDF, MARC , stream formats (MP3, MPEG, etc), OAI directories, FOAF networks and others will be added in the near future. A more complete information about available features of DescribeThis and DCS will be added on the Sand corporate website as soon as possible. --