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.

Contents

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The elements

The first standard published is the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set. It consists of 16 optional metadata elements, any of which may be repeated or omitted.

Title
Creator
Subject
Description
Publisher
Contributor
Date
Type
Format
Identifier
Source
Language
Relation
Coverage
Rights
Audience

The standard is sometimes considered poorly organized; notable flaws include a difficulty in finding definitions of the individual metadata elements (the "audience" element is particularly difficult to locate).

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.

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Examples

One Document Type Definition based on Dublin Core is the Open Source Metadata Framework (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.

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