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DCMI - Dublin Core Metadata Initiative

Whose supporting the DCMI standards?

         

pageoneresults

6:04 am on Dec 31, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Well, I've been brushing up on my metadata knowledge and spent about 4 hours at the DCMI today. They've done some pretty amazing stuff with the Dublin Core Metadata standards which may interest many of you. This is not a post promoting the abuse of the DCMI, there are some valid uses for the DCMI Metadata Element Set in certain industries.

  • Dublin Core Projects [dublincore.org]
    Whose using the Dublin Core Metadata standards? Check out this A-Z list of whose who in the support of the DCMI. The subject area list [dublincore.org] includes; Arts and Humanities, Bibliography, Business, Education, Environment, Mathematics, Medicine, Other, Science and Technology.

  • Dublin Core Metadata Element Set [dublincore.org]
    The Dublin Core metadata element set is a standard for cross domain information resource description. Here an information resource is defined to be anything that has identity. This is the definition used in Internet RFC 2396, Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax, by Tim Berners-Lee et al. There are no fundamental restrictions to the types of resources to which Dublin Core metadata can be assigned.

  • DCMI Metadata Terms [dublincore.org]
    Note: If you are using the Dublin Core metadata element set, be sure to verify your DCMI Terms are correct. This document is an up to date, authoritative specification of all metadata terms maintained by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative - elements, element refinements, encoding schemes, and vocabulary terms (the <a href="http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-type-vocabulary/"]DCMI Type Vocabulary[/url]

  • Dublin Core Metadata Editor [ukoln.ac.uk]
    This service will retrieve a Web page and automatically generate Dublin Core metadata, either as HTML <meta> tags or as RDF/XML, suitable for embedding in the <head>;...</head> section of the page. The generated metadata can be edited using the form provided and converted to various other formats (USMARC, SOIF, IAFA/ROADS, TEI headers, GILS, IMS or RDF) if required. Optional, context sensitive, help is available while editing.

  • Dublin Core Assistant [ukoln.ac.uk]
    DC-assist is a small, flexible help utility for metadata applications and is intended to complement the help pages embedded within existing software. Start DC-assist up once at the beginning of your session for quick and easy access to a set of help pages.

  • Metadata Resources from UKOLN [ukoln.ac.uk]
    This is a must have list of metadata resources for anyone wanting to further develop their knowledge of metadata and related information.

  • Translations of DCMI Documents [dublincore.org]
    Members of the DCMI Community have taken the time to translate DCMI documents. A list of these translations is maintained on this page.

rjohara

7:01 am on Dec 31, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Well, I started putting the DC.Creator element in the <head> of my documents a couple of years ago, just for the heck of it. (I'm the academic type anyway, so I like this library stuff. ;-) I've yet to see it used by any indexing or search services, but I'd be glad to put more such descriptors in if they will be used.

Someone needs to construct a demo site that will manufacture a web catalog card out of Dublin Core metadata - perhaps vaguely along the lines of the W3C's new semantic data extractor:

[w3.org...]

pageoneresults

2:36 pm on Dec 31, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I've yet to see it used by any indexing or search services.

Yup, me too. But, if you look at the list of supporting entities, there may be some there that are of interest in certain industries.

There is another side to this whole metadata thing. What we know as META Tags are being replaced by the RDF and possibly some of the DC.elements set.

I've got a section that I'm testing right now (long term tests) utilizing the complete set of elements. Just out of curiosity, I want to see what impact the DC.elements have on a page that utilizes them. And no, these tags cannot be tested by throwing in some obscure term that the page does not relate to. Its the same when testing META Tags, you can't drop an off the wall term in the Keywords Tag to test its effectiveness.

The Dublin Core Metadata Editor does pretty much what the link does that you posted. It will generate a set of DC.elements based on the existing metadata.

Please everyone, don't rush out and start generating DC.elements for your pages. That is not what this is for. Right now it appears to be mostly supported in educational environments. I posted a list of those using the standards above. If any of those are of interest and will benefit your site, then it may be something worth investigating further.

My next step is to tackle the RDF (Resource Description Framework). The tool above will generate an .rdf document for your pages. How to effectively use it to assist user agents is still something I need to hunker down and learn.

dcrombie

10:58 am on Jan 4, 2004 (gmt 0)



Our local government insists that some of our clients use DC tags but so far (five years on) there's no sign of anything useful coming out of it. 99% of the sites only input the tags once and they are barely relevant to start with.

AFAIK the DC tags were invented at the tail-end of a drinking binge in Dublin when the conference decided they had to come up with _something_ to justify their expense accounts ;)

mbauser2

6:32 am on Jan 5, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I've been following the DCMI on-and-off for years, and the last time I checked none of those projects listed at their site were really crawling the web. Off the top of my head, the only engines I know using DCMI tags are some lame blog-centric engines. (Bloggers apparently still think meta tags are cool -- sometimes, it's like bloggers are time travellers from 1999.)

Honestly, I don't think the DCMI has a real future as an HTML extension. If it suceeds, it will be as RDF -- some sites are already using it to supplement RSS and FOAF files, for example.

I'm planning to go the RDF route myself -- write a perl script to pull the data from my HTML pages, put the RDF files up, and see what happens. (I'll probably end up using a few DCMI HTML tags (like "DC.Date"), to hold the metadata that isn't already structured into the pages's regular HTML.) If somebody lets loose a good RDF crawler, I'll be ready for them, and if they don't, at least I won't have bloated my regular pages with a dozen unused meta tags.

 

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