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Upcoming Events

» 23 January: Translating the Library Catalog from MARC into Linked Data: An Update on the Bibliographic Framework Initiative (NISO/DCMI Webinar with Eric Miller)

» 24 April: Deployment of RDA (Resource Description and Access): Cataloging and its Expression as Linked Data (NISO/DCMI Webinar with Alan Danskin & Gordon Dunsire)

» 22 May: Semantic Mashups Across Large, Heterogeneous Institutions: Experiences from the VIVO Service (NISO/DCMI Webinar with John Fereira)

» 2-6 September 2013: DC-2013, Lisbon, Portugal —(co-located with iPRES)

» 25 September: Implementing Linked Data in Developing Countries and Low-Resource Conditions (NISO/DCMI Webinar)

» 30 October: Metadata for Public Sector Administration (NISO/DCMI Webinar)

» 4 December: Cooperative Authority Control (NISO/DCMI Webinar)

» 8-11 October 2014: DC-2014, Austin, Texas, USA

The Dublin Core^® Metadata Initiative

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, or "DCMI", is an open organization supporting innovation in metadata design and best practices across the metadata ecology. DCMI's activities include work on architecture and modeling, discussions and collaborative work in DCMI Communities and DCMI Task Groups, global conferences, meetings and workshops, and educational efforts to promote widespread acceptance of metadata standards and best practices.

DCMI maintains a number of formal and informal liaisons and relationships with standards bodies and other metadata organizations.

DCMI logo

Announcements:

NISO/DCMI Webinar: Translating the library catalog from MARC into Linked Data: An update on the Bibliographic Framework Initiative

2012-11-28, A NISO/DCMI Webinar with Eric Miller will be held online at 1:00PM Eastern Time (18:00 UTC) on 23 January 2013. Registration for this webinar closes 23 January 2013 at 12:00PM Eastern (17:00 UTC). In May 2012, the Library of Congress announced a new modeling initiative focused on reflecting the MARC 21 library standard as a Linked Data model for the Web, with an initial model to be proposed by the consulting company Zepheira. The goal of the initiative is to translate the MARC 21 format to a Linked Data model while retaining the richness and benefits of existing data in the historical format. In this webinar, Eric Miller of Zepheira will report on progress towards this important goal, starting with an analysis of the translation problem and concluding with potential migration scenarios for a broad-based transition from MARC to a new bibliographic framework. Additional information can be found at http://www.niso.org/news/events/2013/dcmi/bibframework/.

DC-2013 Call for Papers published

2012-11-28, The Call for Papers for DC-2013, to be hosted by the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal, 2-6 September 2013, has been published at http://purl.org/dcevents/dc-2013/cfp. The call solicits submissions for Full Papers Project Reports, Posters, Special Sessions and DCMI Community Workshop Sessions. Deadline for submissions is 29 March 2013.

DC-2013 conference theme announced: "Linking to the Future"

2012-11-28, DC-2013 in Lisbon will explore questions regarding the persistence, maintenance, and preservation of metadata and descriptive vocabularies. The need for stable representations and descriptions spans all sectors including cultural heritage and scientific data, eGovernment, finance and commerce. Thus, the maintenance and management of metadata is essential to address the long term availability of information of legal, cultural and economic value. On the web, data -- and especially descriptive vocabularies -- can change or vanish from one moment to the next. Nonetheless, the web increasingly forms the ecosystem for our vocabularies and our data. DC-2013 will bring together in Lisbon the community of metadata scholars and practitioners to engage in the exchange of knowledge and best practices in developing a sustainable metadata ecosystem. DC-2013 will be collocated and run simultaneous with iPRES 2013 providing a rich environment for synergistic exploration of issues common to both communities. Information about the conference can be found at http://purl.org/dcevents/dc2013

Current DCMI Work Themes:

DCMI has a set of "work themes" that focus the Initiative as a whole and change as the metadata ecology evolves. The themes address broad issues in metadata that cut across the more siloed interests of domain-specific Communities and Task Groups within the Initiative. These DCMI-supported work themes receive targeted attention and commitment of resources from DCMI as an organization.

Platform-independent Application Profiles

The DCMI Abstract Model (DCAM), published as a DCMI Recommendation in 2007, provides an abstract syntax for packaging Semantic-Web-compatible data in validatable record formats. DCAM was designed to bridge the modern paradigm of the unbounded Linked Data graph and the more familiar paradigm of the validatable metadata record, locally managed and constrained using a myriad of software platforms and implementation technologies. For five years, DCAM has inspired a wide range of deployment experiences, and the core RDF standards themselves continue to be extended. The activity "platform-independent application profiles" is re-evaluating the need and requirements for a common language to express metadata design patterns, both as templates for Linked-Data-compatible data formats and as reference points for creating and consuming coherent metadata within communities of discourse and practice.

Monitor & participate in this activity:

Meeting Minutes & Work Agenda: Platform-independent Application Profiles activity wiki

Discussion: Architecture Forum mailing list & list archive

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Mapping Diverse Vocabularies

While DCMI Metadata Terms and other core vocabularies increase the coherence of metadata by providing shared reference points, the unavoidable proliferation of diverse but overlapping vocabularies threatens to create metadata silos. A key part of the solution is to create machine-readable mappings. The activity "mapping diverse vocabularies" aims at mapping DCMI metadata terms to related terms in other vocabularies. In the absence of well-established practices for publishing and maintaining such mappings, this activity aspires to establish a workflow and publication practices that can be adopted by other vocabulary maintainers. The starting point for this activity is a mapping to the terms defined by the Schema.org initiative.

Monitor & participate in this activity:

Meeting Minutes & Work Agenda: Mapping Diverse Vocabularies activity wiki

Discussion: Architecture Forum mailing list & list archive

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Sustainable Vocabularies

As a foundation for applications, the value of any given vocabulary depends on the perceived certainty that the vocabulary—both its machine-readable schemas and human-readable specification documents—will remain reliably accessible over time and that its URIs will not be sold, re-purposed, or simply forgotten. In order to raise awareness of this issue, DCMI has formulated an agreement with the FOAF Project, which is owned by individuals, with contingency plans for transferring maintenance control in the short or long term should exigent circumstances require. This activity examines the issues around vocabulary sustainability and governance with the goal of formulating best practices and, ultimately, of ensuring that our vocabularies will be preserved by society's long-term memory institutions.

Monitor & participate in this activity:

Meeting Minutes & Work Agenda: Vocabulary Management Community wiki

Discussion: Vocabulary Management Community mailing list & list archive

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DCMI Terms Technical Update:

DCMI Metadata Terms published with RDFa markup

2012-06-14, A maintenance release of DCMI Metadata Terms, published today, now includes HTML markup describing all of its properties, classes, datatypes, and vocabulary encoding schemes in machine-readable RDF in accordance with the new W3C RDFa Lite 1.1 specification. RDFa Lite 1.1, published as a W3C Recommendation on 7 June 2012, is the simplest variant of RDFa, a syntax for embedding structured data in Web pages. A Web page with RDFa provides -- in the same source document -- both the human-readable text rendered on-screen by browsers and the detailed machine-readable representation needed by Semantic Web applications. The publication software used by DCMI for the past decade was modified and extended to support RDFa by Hugh Barnes, Gregg Kellogg, and Mitsuharu Nagamori with help from Manu Sporny, Tom Baker, Dan Brickley, and Jon Phipps. All of the software and data used to generate this documentation is available from an open-source repository on GitHub.

DCMI Metadata Terms available in multiple formats via content negotiation

2012-06-14, Following the W3C guidelines "Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies", documentation of DCMI's metadata terms may now be requested by Web browsers and software applications in several formats. For example, an RDF description of the DCMI property "Title" may be requested as a file in RDF/XML or Turtle syntax, via HTTP content negotiation, or as an HTML page with an RDF representation embedded in its markup using RDFa. Since March 2000, users navigating to the URI http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title in a Web browser have been shown a difficult-to-read RDF/XML schema. Browsers will now display a human-readable HTML document, and most browsers will take users to the spot in the page where the property "Title" is defined. DCMI's implementation of content negotiation was undertaken by Jon Phipps with assistance from Tom Baker and Jinho Park. Interested software implementers are invited to inspect, comment on, contribute to, or raise issues about the approach taken, which is fully documented in an open-source repository on GitHub.