In recent years, a large number of RDF datasets have been built and published on the Web in fields as diverse as linguistics or life sciences, as well as general datasets such as DBpedia or Wikidata. The joint exploitation of these datasets requires specific knowledge about their content, access points, and commonalities. However, not all datasets contain a self-description, and not all access points can handle the complex queries used to generate such a description. In this article, we provide a standard-based approach to generate the description of a dataset. The generated descriptions as well as the process of their computation are expressed using standard vocabularies and languages. We implemented our approach into a framework, called IndeGx, where each indexing feature and its computation is collaboratively and declaratively defined in a GitHub repository. We have experimented IndeGx on a set of 339 RDF datasets with endpoints listed in public catalogs, over 8 months. The results show that we can collect, as much as possible, important characteristics of the datasets depending on their availability and capacities. The resulting index captures the commonalities, variety and disparity in the offered content and services and it provides an important support to any application designed to query RDF datasets.