Dublin Core
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The Dublin Core is a metadata standard for describing digital objects (including webpages), often expressed in XML.
It was so named because the first meeting of metadata and web specialists which saw its birth was held in the town of Dublin, Ohio in the United States.
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The elements
The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, part of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) Recommendation (see References) consists of 16 optional metadata elements, any of which could be repeated or omitted.
- Title
- Creator
- Subject
- Description
- Publisher
- Contributor
- Date
- Type
- Format
- Identifier
- Source
- Language
- Relation
- Coverage
- Rights
- Audience
Unlike many other document metadata standards, there is no prescribed order in Dublin Core for presenting or using the elements. In the list above the "Title" element was put first and the "Audience" element last, but it could just as correctly have been the reverse, or all the elements could have been presented or used in alphabetical order.
There are two ways of using the elements: With or without extensions. Using them without extensions means using "DC simple". Using them with extensions means using "DC qualified". The extensions are called refinements or qualifiers.
For instance, "created", "valid", "issued" and "modified" are the recommended refinements of the "date" element. Thus, dc.date.created would be the name for the element for the date of creation of a document in DC qualified.
Several elements have schemes or a ready made controlled vocabulary. For instance, the "Type" element has 12 recommended terms: Collection, dataset, event, image, interactive resource, service, software, sound, text, physical object, still image, moving image.
Application Examples
One Document Type Definition based on Dublin Core is the Source Metadata Framework (http://www.ibiblio.org/osrt/omf/|Open) (OMF) specification. OMF is in turn used by ScrollKeeper, which is used by the GNOME desktop and KDE help browsers and the ScrollServer documentation server.
PBCore is also based on Dublin Core.
See also
References
- [1] Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (http://dublincore.org/)
- [2] Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Publishes DCMI Abstract Model (http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2005-03-21-a.html) (March 2005)
- [3] DCMI Metadata Terms (http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/) (June 2005)|de:Dublin Core
eo:DCMI nl:Dublin Core ja:Dublin Core pl:Dublin Core zh:都柏林核心