HIE Library Projects

The Dublin Core: content description for electronic resources

Metadata for Electronic Resources

The Dublin Core is a metadata element set intended to facilitate discovery of electronic resources. Originally conceived for author-generated description of Web resources, it has attracted the attention of formal resource description communities such as libraries, healthcare, government agencies, and commercial organisations.

The characteristics of the Dublin Core:

Simplicity

The Dublin Core is intended to be usable by non-cataloguers as well as resource description specialists. Most of the elements have a commonly understood semantics of roughly the complexity of a library catalogue card.

Semantic interoperability

In the Internet Commons, disparate description models interfere with the ability to search across discipline boundaries. Promoting a commonly understood set of descriptors that helps to unify other data content standards increases the possibility of semantic interoperability across disciplines.

International consensus

Recognition of the international scope of resource discovery on the Web is critical to the development of effective discovery infrastructure. The Dublin Core benefits from active participation and promotion in some 20 countries in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.

Extensibility

The Dublin Core provides an economical alternative to more elaborate description models such as the full MARC cataloging of the library world. Additionally, it includes sufficient flexibility and extensibility to encode the structure and more elaborate semantics inherent in richer description standards

Metadata modularity on the Web

The diversity of metadata needs on the Web requires an infrastructure that supports the coexistence of complementary, independently maintained metadata packages. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has begun implementing an architecture for metadata for the Web. The Resource Description Framework, or RDF, is designed to support the many different metadata needs of vendors and information providers. Representatives of the Dublin Core effort are actively involved in the development of this architecture, bringing the digital library perspective to bear on this important component of the Web infrastructure.