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Upcoming Events

» 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

DC-2013 in Lisbon on 2-6 September 2013 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.

Announcements:

Deadline for DC-2013 submissions - 29 March 2013

2013-02-01, The deadline for submissions to DC-2013 in Lisbon has been set for 29 March. The call for participation is available at http://purl.org/dcevents/dc-2013/cfp. Submissions are being accepted for full papers, project reports, and posters. Special session proposals are also being accepted. DC-2013 is being collocated with iPRES 2013 in Lisbon, Portugal on 2-6 September 2013.

Joint DC-2013 / iPRES-2013 Doctoral Symposium at DC-2013

2013-02-01, DCMI and iPRES are pleased to announce that they will be holding a Joint Doctoral Symposium on 2 September 2013 at their collocated conferences in Lisbon, Portugal. A specific call for contributions will be issued and will be available at http://purl.org/dcevents/dc-2013/cds. The Symposium and the collocated conferences will provide the Symposium participants with the opportunity to engage with colleagues from around the world and contribute to the development of their research and social networks. The co-chairs of the Symposium are Eva Méndez, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain and Artur Caetano, IST/INESC-ID, Portugal.

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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