DC-2018: Porto

The Dublin Core™ Metadata Initiative (DCMI) annual international conference in 2018 was co-located with the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) annual international conference, and was hosted by the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP) in Portugal, September 10-13, 2018.

DC-2018 Conference theme

Since the late 1990s, the Dublin Core™ community has worked predominantly with open standards, open data and open-source software. The advantages of openness have been recognized in areas such as open science, open education and open access to research outputs - in short, open knowledge.

The Dublin Core™ community has focused on the role of structured description (metadata) in finding and using this knowledge. The role of metadata has evolved over this last quarter-century with the rise of search engines, social media, crowdsourcing, Semantic Web, and machine learning alongside the traditional arts of metadata curation.

DC-2018 asked how metadata technologies and practices must further evolve to support open knowledge, often at scale, given current budget realities.

DC-2018 brought together researchers, teachers, students, practitioners and developers working with metadata for a few intense days of demonstration, discussion and collaboration.

The Dublin Core™ community began in 1995 with the shared endeavour of creating "simple" and interoperable metadata. Through the 2000s, emphasis shifted to enabling flexible metadata solutions based on multi-vocabulary application profiles and interoperability as Linked Data. Metadata developments of interest to the Dublin Core™ community currently range from vocabularies such as BIBFRAME, Schema.org, IIIF and Darwin Core, to WikiData processes and RDF validation languages such as ShEx and SHACL. Today's shared endeavour focuses on techniques, software, and best practices for creating, mapping, and maintaining semantically coherent vocabularies and, by extension, interoperable metadata.

DC-2018 was collocated with TPDL 2018. This fit DCMI’s tradition of working with other communities in its mission to increase interoperability and harmonisation in the development and application of metadata.