Kal Ahmed has announced MDF, a specification and implementation of reusable modules for the processing of metadata.

The initial release includes modules for stripping metadata from XML and HTML META sources, and serializing it into RDF or XML Topic Maps syntax. Ahmed identifies four stages of metadata processing in which reusable modules might be implemented:

• Discovery
• Extraction
• Cleaning
• Aggregation

Ahmed writes:

MDF attempts to improve the reusability of the different processing functions for each of these stages by defining a framework in which the functions may be designed and implemented separately and then linked together in any combination to provide the desired processing.