APRIL 29, 2004, FRANKFORT, ILLINOIS - Here at Man's Best Friend Software, we are committed to adding the maximum possible value to The Breeder's Standard .NET®, our new web-based program.  Right now, we've got over 2.1 Million dogs in the program, representing 200 breeds.  Some breeds have over 100,000 animals in them.  Why are we putting these dogs into the database?  Because we're trying to save you the effort of typing these dogs in from other sources.  Typing adds the chance of errors in transcription, and frankly, you have better things to do with your time.  You have dogs to breed and show, and we want you to be able to maximize your time doing just that.

We have obtained data from many sources.  One source we'd especially like to thank is the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals at http://www.offa.org, a truly fine organization run by the very best people anywhere.  In the near future, our present OFA data will be extended by hundreds of thousands of certifications (we have about 250,000 right now), and OFA-numbered animals will have links directly to the OFA "Vertical Pedigree" engine.  As new OFA certifications come through, they will be added to the database.

Another source of data is free web-based pedigree databases.  We have developed a robot program that is able to acquire dogs from these sources, strip out the HTML, and put them into TBS. NET.  We have used this robot to acquire a large number of dogs of many different breeds.  As a precaution against "stepping on toes," we checked for a robots.txt and for HTML META tags that tell robots to go away.  This is the Internet version of a "no trespassing" sign.  If either of these things were found, we went away.  As for copyright concerns, in the same way that one cannot copyright the names and addresses and phone numbers in a telephone directory, one cannot copyright the names or vital statistics of dogs.  So, doing this was lawful and ethical, and we want you to know that we did it.

We would like to thank the proprietors of these sites for keeping them open and, by doing so, making it easier for you to do your vital work.  We have extended offers to some to host their sites at no cost on the TBS.NET engine, as an additional way of saying thanks.  Their generosity, made manifest by their refusal to "hoard" the databases to themselves, will make not only our customers, but dog lovers everywhere happier, as breeds improve by the sharing of information.

We will continue to locate and acquire data for our customers, so that TBS.NET will remain what it is: historically powerful and easy to use, with the best pedigree library anywhere.

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