DC-6: Sixth Dublin Core Metadata Workshop

The sixth Dublin Core Metadata Workshop convened 101 experts in resource description from 16 countries on 4 continents at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. With support from the National Science Foundation and the Coalition for Networked Information, DC-6 marked a significant evolution in the Dublin Core initiative — shifting focus from resolving issues in plenary sessions to identifying unresolved problems and assigning them to formal working groups.

This approach produced an ambitious workplan for 1999 and established the governance structures that would guide the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative through its transition from a workshop series to a formal standards organization.

Key Outcomes

Governance Structures Established

DC-6 formalized the organizational structure of what would become DCMI:

• Dublin Core Directorate — hosted by OCLC Office of Research; maintained the Dublin Core Home Page, official documents, working groups, and workshops
• Policy Advisory Committee (PAC) — representatives from major stakeholder communities serving a liaison function
• Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) — primarily working group chairs; discussed and ratified technical proposals
• Working Groups — charter-based groups with scheduled deliverables, using electronic discussion forums

Standardization Progress

• RFC 2413 was published — the first formal expression of Dublin Core semantics describing DC 1.0 (15 unqualified elements)
• Dublin Core became a work item for both NISO and CEN (European Committee for Standardization)
• HTML encoding specification by John Kunze formalized embedding conventions in use since 1996

RDF Integration

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) became a W3C Recommendation in February 1999, with Eric Miller co-chairing the working group. RDF provided a framework for exchanging diverse metadata types using XML, with namespace facilities that could accommodate Dublin Core alongside other vocabularies.

Qualification Framework

The workshop identified four reasons for qualifying Dublin Core elements:

1. Semantic specificity — using controlled vocabularies (Dewey, MeSH, LCSH)
2. Encoding rules — ensuring reliable parsing (ISO-8601 for dates)
3. Formal substructure — compound values with sub-elements
4. Authority control — authoritative records for persons, organizations, places

Internationalization

By this point, the Dublin Core Element Set had been translated into 18 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Bahasa Indonesia, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, and Turkish.

Major Issues Addressed

• Formalization of Dublin Core governance processes
• Standardization pathways and responsible organizations
• Qualification mechanisms for metadata refinement
• RDF role and relationships to other metadata models
• Interoperability with DOI, INDECS, GILS, and IMS metadata initiatives

Dublin Core 2.0 Discussion

The workshop raised theoretical questions about restructuring elements around underlying logical models — whether Creator, Contributor, and Publisher could be unified as a general "agent" concept, whether Source is simply a Relation variant, and whether dates could be reframed as lifecycle events. This exploration would influence the later development of the DCMI Abstract Model.

Notable Projects

• CIMI Interoperability Testbed — 14 museums created records for 200,000+ resources using Dublin Core
• CORC (Cooperative Online Resource Catalog) — OCLC research project enabling metadata creation in both MARC and Dublin Core
• Finland government adoption — joining Australia and Denmark in adopting Dublin Core for government documents