NCBC BioSiteMaps
iTools employs a new mechanism, Biositemaps, for generating, disseminating and consumption of resource descriptions. Biositemaps represent a mechanism for open broadcasting and retrieval of meta-data about biomedical data, tools and services (i.e., biomedical resources) over the Internet. Biositemaps blend the hierarchical features of Sitemaps (enabling efficient web-content exploration) and RSS Feeds (a mechanism for wide and effective news dissemination). Biositemaps facilitates a decentralized, portable, extensible and computationally tractable generation and consumption of meta-data about existent, revised and new resources for biomedical computation.
Web browsers, crawlers and robots can discover, accumulate, process, integrate and deliver Biositemaps content to (human or machine) users in a variety of graphical, tabular, computational formats.