The Dublin Core™ Metadata Initiative supports innovation in metadata design and best practices. DCMI is supported by its members and is a project of ASIS&T.
Stewardship
For more than twenty years, the DCMI community has developed and curated Dublin Core Specifications. More recently, DCMI has become recognised as a trusted steward of metadata vocabularies, concept schemes and other metadata artefacts, and has taken responsibility for other community-created specifications. DCMI remains committed to this important work, and is actively developing more efficient and sustainable approaches to the stewardship of these standards, through the work of the DCMI Usage Board.
Community
DCMI is defined by its community which is responsible for the innovative developments and evolving good practices which DCMI shares with the world. Much of DCMI's work is organised in working and interest groups. DCMI's community is and has always been international, with active participants from around the world. The primary community event is the DCMI Annual Conference. DCMI also organises regular webinars, given by members of the community wishing to share their expertise with like-minded peers. Finally, DCMI collaborates with a number of other organisations.
Learning
DCMI supports teachers and learners of modern metadata technologies and practices. An updated Metadata Basics page highlights current trends in descriptive metadata in the style of Dublin Core, which aims at interoperability through using globally shared vocabularies, constrained in application-specific profiles, based on principles of Linked Data. Interested learners can also explore a glossary page, a Linked Data Competency Index that enumerates relevant skills to be learned, a guide for users of DCMI metadata terms, occasional webinars and tutorials at DCMI annual conferences.
Development
DCMI has a long history of fostering and supporting technical development and innovation through the activities of its community, often in partnership with other organisations. Following on from the development of the ubiquitous DCMI Metadata Terms, the community has in more recent years focussed on the concept of the metadata application profile, developing supporting frameworks and conceptual models such as the Singapore Framework. Most recently, the Application Profiles Interest Group has formed to address the next stage of development in this space.
Post-it notes image, © Bram Willemse, License: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Other photographs, © Paul Walk, License: CC BY 4.0
Regional Members
Institutional Members
News
Following on from the success of DCMI 2019 in Seoul (see Proceedings), we are pleased to announce the call for proposals in the DCMI 2020 International Conference on Metadata, Ottawa, Canada, 14-17 September 2020. We are grateful to Carleton University for offering to host us this year.
This year's conference will mark the 25th anniversary of the original Dublin Core™ workshop. We will both reflect on two and a half decades of innovations while looking ahead to future developments.
DCMI is pleased to announce the publication by ISO of a new international standard, ISO 15836 Part 2: "DCMI Properties and classes" (ISO 15836-2:2019). In parallel, a revised specification for DCMI Metadata Terms has been published on the DCMI website.
The original "Dublin Core Metadata Element Set" of fifteen elements, originally designed in the late 1990s to support the generic interoperability of resource descriptions across languages and disciplines, was first published as an ISO standard in 2003 and remains available today in a recently updated version as ISO 15836 Part 1 (ISO 15836-1:2017).