Metadata Harvesting Tool

A question was recently posted: "I am looking for metadata harvesting and data mining services to gather and organize metadata from years of spreadsheet data plus information from external image vendors' WebPages to input into a DAM with legacy assets. Can you recommend some resources for these service providers?"

Seth Earley's Answer:  Interesting that you ask.  About two years ago, I had asked one of my consultants to go through a web site and harvest terms from the pages.  I was interested in metadata on pages themselves but also in extracting the terms from various kinds of files for inclusion in a taxonomy. We poked around on the web and found some shareware but it did not exactly meet our needs.  So, like any good developer, he rolled his own.

After quite a bit of development, he came up with "Disk Bee".  (Figured anything "Spider" was over used, hackneyed, trite...:-) )

It's actually a pretty nifty tool that we mostly use in our metadata and DAM projects (as opposed to licensing it - but you can certainly explore that possibility).  It will do exactly what you are looking for and then some.  There is no web page for information.  The developer can be reached at Prakash@earley.com.  Another person to reach is Faye@earley.com.  Prakash can talk with you about the capabilities of the tool and Faye can get into business details of licensing the tool - which is around $5k (though we primarily use this in our service offerings). 

Another tool we use is Metalogix.  (www.metalogix.com).  This is a tool primarily for content auditing and migration that can also be used for harvesting metadata.  I believe the tool is about $8k

Seth.