I thought I should correct and clarify the use of EMSL (even though this isn't specific toward your request, qvx.)
http://esml.itsc.uah.edu/index.jsp It's more for data format recognition and conversion. Here's a description from the site. The sw was developed for earth science, but is very useful for any domain. ESML is an interchange technology that enables data (both structural and semantic) interoperability with applications without enforcing a standard format. Users can write external files using ESML schema to describe the structure of the data file. Applications can utilize the ESML Library to parse this description file and decode the data format. As a result, software developers can now build data format independent applications utilizing the ESML technology. Furthermore, semantic tags can be added to the ESML files by linking different domain ontologies to provide a complete machine understandable data description. This ESML description file allows the development of intelligent applications that can now understand and "use" the data. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
