The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (aka DCMI) is an organization whose aim is to provide simple standards to facilitate the finding, sharing and management of information. It was promoted by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) and by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in its first phase, trying to create some elements that permitted the description of digital resources so that they were found and retrieved much easier. DCMI’s metadata elements provide a small and fundamental group of text elements through which most resources can be described and catalogued. To be able to do this, they need to use 15 metadata elements, which all together form the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES). These are them:
- Title
- Creator
- Subject
- Description
- Publisher
- Contributor
- Date
- Type
- Format
- Identifier
- Source
- Language
- Relation
- Coverage
- Rights
These elements are optional and can be repeated, and using them, the DCMI can describe physical resources such as books, digital materials such as video, sound, image, or text files, and composite media like web pages.
DCMI’s activities include work on architecture and modeling, discussions and collaborative work in DCMI Communities and DCMI Task Groups, annual conferences and workshops, standards liaison, and educational efforts to promote widespread acceptance of metadata standards and practices.
You can follow this organization in their Twitter page: http://twitter.com/#!/dublincore
References:
- Dublin Core (14.14, October 17, 2010). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15.06, October 30, 201o, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core
- Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (2010). In Dublincore.org. Retrieved 15.30, October 30, 2010, from: http://dublincore.org/about-us/
- Evolución del Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. In Ugr.es. Retrieved 16.03, October 30, 2010, from: http://www.ugr.es/~jsenso/curriculum/dcmi.pdf
- Metadatos Dublin Core. In hipertexto.info. Retrieved 16.45, October 30, 2010, from: http://www.hipertexto.info/documentos/dublin_core.htm
