Dublin Core

Definition

• Dublin Core is a very popular metadata standard and managed by the The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI).

• Quote from the Using Dublin Core (19:20, 9 May 2006 (MEST)): The Dublin Core metadata standard is a simple yet effective element set for describing a wide range of networked resources. The Dublin Core standard includes two levels: Simple and Qualified. Simple Dublin Core comprises fifteen elements; Qualified Dublin Core includes three additional elements (Audience, Provenance and RightsHolder), as well as a group of element refinements (also called qualifiers) that refine the semantics of the elements in ways that may be useful in resource discovery. The semantics of Dublin Core have been established by an international, cross-disciplinary group of professionals from librarianship, computer science, text encoding, the museum community, and other related fields of scholarship and practice.

See also: Learning Object Metadata Standard and controlled vocabulary

Technical details

Dublin Core is an RDF application.

The Simple Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) consists of 15 metadata elements:

1. Title
2. Creator
3. Subject
4. Description
5. Publisher
6. Contributor
7. Date
8. Type
9. Format
10. Identifier
11. Source
12. Language
13. Relation
14. Coverage
15. Rights

Since 20005 (?), there is a working group attempting to extend Dublin Core for education as an alternative to IEEE Learning Object Metadata Standard (LOM). This is connected to an emerging layered "onion" model - the The Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles and that has been described by Pete Johnson, retrieved 09:32, 3 June 2008 (UTC), as follows:

• Level 1: "Informal interoperability", based essentially on the natural-language definitions of metadata terms;
• Level 2: "Semantic interoperability", based on the RDF model;
• Level 3: "DCAM-based syntactic interoperability", introducing the notions of descriptions and description sets, as defined by the DCMI Abstract Model;
• Level 4: "Singapore Framework interoperability", in which an application is supported by the complete set of components specified by the

Links

Dublin Core

• Dublin Core Initiative Home
• Using Dublin Core (The official tutorial)

Dublic Core Education

• DCMI Education Community Home page
• DCMI Education Community Wiki

RDF

• W3C RDF Primer
• RDF Primer - en français

Educational vocabularies overviews

• See Metadata

References

• Mason, J. & Sutton, S. (2005). Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, Education Working Group. Draft Proposal.
• DCAM - Powell, Andy, Mikael Nilsson, Ambjörn Naeve, Pete Johnston and Thomas Baker. DCMI Abstract Model. DCMI Recommendation. June 2007. http://dublincore.org/documents/2007/06/04/abstract-model/
• DSP - Mikael Nilsson. DCMI Description Set Profile Model. Working Draft, December 2007. http://dublincore.org/architecturewiki/DescriptionSetProfile