Dublin Core

Milestones

• 1995 - In 1995 an invitational meeting hosted by the OCLC Online Computer Library Center and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) takes place at Dublin, Ohio, the headquarters of OCLC.
• 1998, September - RFC 2413 "Dublin Core Metadata for Resource Discovery" details the original 15-element vocabulary.
• 2000 - Issuance of Qualified Dublin Core.
• 2001 - Publication of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set as ANSI/NISO Z39.85.
• 2008 - Publication of Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Terms in RDF.

Evolution of vocabulary

The Dublin Core Element Set was a response to concern about accurate finding of resources on the Web, with some early assumptions that this would be a library function. In particular it anticipated a future in which scholarly materials would be searchable on the World Wide Web. Whereas HTML was being used to mark-up the structure of documents, metadata was needed to mark-up the contents of documents. Given the great number of documents on the World Wide Web and those soon to be added to it, it was proposed that "self-identifying" documents would be necessary.{{cite journal |last=Weibel |first=S. |date=1995 |title=Metadata: the foundations of resource description |journal=D-Lib Magazine

To this end, the Dublin Core Metadata Workshop met beginning in 1995 to develop a vocabulary that could be used to insert consistent metadata into Web documents. Originally defined as 15 metadata elements, the Dublin Core Element Set allowed authors of web pages a vocabulary and method for creating simple metadata for their works. It provided a simple, flat element set that could be used

Qualified Dublin Core was developed in the late 1990s to provide an extension mechanism to the vocabulary of 15 elements. This was a response to communities whose metadata needs required additional detail.

In 2012, the DCMI Metadata Terms was created using a RDF data model. This expanded element set incorporates the original 15 elements and many of the qualifiers of the qualified Dublin Core as RDF properties. The full set of elements is found under the namespace http://purl.org/dc/terms/. There is a separate namespace for the original 15 elements as previously defined: http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/.

Core elements

The Dublin Core vocabulary that was published in 1999 consisted of 15 terms:

• contributor
• coverage
• creator
• date
• description
• format
• identifier
• language
• publisher
• relation
• rights
• source
• subject
• title
• type

The vocabulary was commonly expressed in HTML 'meta' tagging in the "" section of an HTML-encoded page. The vocabulary could be used in any metadata serialization including key/value pairs and XML.

Qualified Dublin Core

Subsequent to the specification of the original 15 elements, Qualified Dublin Core was developed to provide an extension mechanism to be used when the primary 15 terms were not sufficient. A set of common refinements was provided in the documentation. These schemes include controlled vocabularies and formal notations or parsing rules. Qualified Dublin Core was not limited to these specific refinements, allowing communities to create extended metadata terms to meet their needs.

The guiding principle for the qualification of Dublin Core elements, colloquially known as the Dumb-Down Principle, states that an application that does not understand a specific element refinement term should be able to ignore the qualifier and treat the metadata value as if it were an unqualified (broader) element. While this may result in some loss of specificity, the remaining element value (without the qualifier) should continue to be generally correct and useful for discovery.

Qualified Dublin Core added qualifiers to these elements:

And added three elements not in the base 15:

• Audience
• Provenance
• RightsHolder

Qualified Dublin Core is often used with a "dot syntax", with a period separating the element and the qualifier(s). This is shown in this excerpted example provided by Chan and Hodges:

DCMI Metadata Terms

The DCMI Metadata Terms lists the current set of the Dublin Core vocabulary. This set includes the fifteen terms of the DCMES (in italic), as well as many of the qualified terms. Each term has a unique URI in the namespace http://purl.org/dc/terms, and all are defined as RDF properties.

• abstract
• accessRights
• accrualMethod
• accrualPeriodicity
• accrualPolicy
• alternative
• audience
• available
• bibliographicCitation
• conformsTo
• contributor
• coverage
• created
• creator
• date
• dateAccepted
• dateCopyrighted
• dateSubmitted
• description
• educationLevel
• extent
• format
• hasFormat
• hasPart
• hasVersion
• identifier
• instructionalMethod
• isFormatOf
• isPartOf
• isReferencedBy
• isReplacedBy
• isRequiredBy
• issued
• isVersionOf
• language
• license
• mediator
• medium
• modified
• provenance
• publisher
• references
• relation
• replaces
• requires
• rights
• rightsHolder
• source
• spatial
• subject
• tableOfContents
• temporal
• title
• type
• valid

It also includes these RDF classes which are used as domains and ranges of some properties:

• Agent
• AgentClass
• BibliographicResource
• FileFormat
• Frequency
• Jurisdiction
• LicenseDocument
• LinguisticSystem
• Location
• LocationPeriod/OrJurisdiction
• MediaType
• MediaTypeOrExtent
• MethodOfAccrual
• MethodOfInstruction
• PeriodOfTime
• PhysicalMedium
• PhysicalResource
• Policy
• ProvenanceStatement
• RightsStatement
• SizeOrDuration
• Standard

Standardization

The Dublin Core Metadata Terms vocabulary has been formally standardized internationally as ISO 15836 by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and as IETF RFC 5013 by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), as well as in the U.S. as ANSI/NISO Z39.85 by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).

Maintenance

Changes that are made to the Dublin Core standard are reviewed by a DCMI Usage Board within the context of a DCMI Namespace Policy. This policy describes how terms are assigned and also sets limits on the amount of editorial changes allowed to the labels, definitions, and usage comments.

Syntax

Syntax choices for metadata expressed with the Dublin Core elements depend on context. Dublin Core concepts and semantics are designed to be syntax independent and apply to a variety of contexts, as long as the metadata is in a form suitable for interpretation by both machines and people.

Applications

Despite its limitations, Dublin Core is widely used due to simplicity, maturity and interoperability.

One Document Type Definition based on Dublin Core is the Open Source Metadata Framework (OMF) specification. OMF is in turn used by Rarian (superseding ScrollKeeper), which is used by the GNOME desktop and KDE help browsers and the ScrollServer documentation server.

PBCore is also based on Dublin Core. The Zope CMF's Metadata products, used by the Plone, ERP5, the Nuxeo CPS Content management systems, SimpleDL, and Fedora Commons also implement Dublin Core. The EPUB e-book format uses Dublin Core metadata in the OPF file. Qualified Dublin Core is used in the DSpace archival management software.

The Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) metadata standard is an application profile of Dublin Core.{{Cite web | access-date = 28 November 2019 | archive-date = 27 November 2019 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20191127003054/http://www.agls.gov.au/pdf/AGLS%20Metadata%20Standard%20Part%201%20Reference%20Description.PDF | url-status = dead

References

References

1. "History".
2. (22 December 2011). "Dublin Core".
3. (March 1995). "DCMI: The OCLC/NCSA Metadata Workshop: The Essential Elements of Network Object Description".
4. (September 1998). "Dublin Core Metadata for Resource Discovery".
5. (2001). "ANSI/NISO Z39.85-2001". ANSI/NISO.
6. Baker, Tom. (2012). "Libraries, languages of description, and linked data: a Dublin Core perspective". Library Hi Tech.
7. (2012-06-14). "Expressing Dublin Core Metadata Using RDF".
8. Weibel, S.L.. (1995). "The World Wide Web and emerging Internet resource discovery standards for scholarly literature". Library Trends.
9. (1997). "An element set to support resource discovery". International Journal of Digital Libraries.
10. (2001). "Author-generated Dublin Core metadata for web resources: a baseline study in an organization In". Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications.
11. "DCMI Metadata Terms". Dublincore.org.
12. "DCMI Metadata Terms".
13. "DCMI: Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1: Reference Description".
14. (December 1999). "Encoding Dublin Core Metadata in HTML". IETF.org.
15. (2006-05-30). "Expressing Dublin Core™ metadata using XML".
16. (2005). "Using Dublin Core™ - Dublin Core™ Qualifiers".
17. (2007). "Cataloging and classification : an introduction". Scarecrow Press.
18. "DCMI: DCMI Grammatical Principles".
19. (20 November 2012). "Dumb-Down Principle".
20. (May 2017). "ISO 15836-1:2017 – Information and documentation – The Dublin Core metadata element set – Part 1: Core elements". International Organization for Standardization.
21. [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5013.txt The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set], Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, August 2007
22. (22 May 2007). "NISO Standards – National Information Standards Organization". Niso.org.
23. (2007-07-02). "Namespace Policy for Dublin Core Metadata Initiative".
24. "Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1". Dublincore.org.
25. da Silva, João Rocha. (June 2019). "Ranking Dublin Core descriptor lists from user interactions: a case study with Dublin Core Terms using the Dendro platform". International Journal on Digital Libraries.
26. "m e t a l a b open source metadata framework".
27. "PBCore Schema – PBCore".
28. "Open Packaging Format (OPF) § Publication Metadata".
29. "Dspace metadata and bitstream format registries".