Unusual Meta Tags

Anyone know what they are for and if they really help?

[AprilS]

I used to use the service of a SEO company. However, after a year I wasn't very impressed so I've taken that on myself (what a headache). However, I'm going through all of our pages and noticed they used A LOT of different types of meta tags (besides the usual - keywords, description, etc).

Does anyone know exactly what the purpose of meta tags like the ones below are for....who uses them (spiders)...and if they help in any way?

<META NAME="VW96.objecttype"
<META NAME="DC.Title"
<META NAME="DC.Subject"
<META NAME="DC.Description"
<META NAME="DC.Coverage.PlaceName"

I've looked online and kind find a "definition" of these meta tags and why someone would use them. They seem more like a waste of space and I'm thinking about yanking them, but just wanted to check and see if they really are useful.

[tedster]

These are examples of the Dublin Core [webmasterworld.com] meta tag initiative. To date they seem to mean nothing for SEO - but read the linked thread and you'll get an idea about what they hope to do.

[mbauser2]

Argh. Meta tags.

The first one is for SearchBC [vancouver-webpages.com], a (defunct?) search engine that only indexes sites in British Columbia. If your has nothing to do with BC, your SEO was robbing you blind.

The rest are Dublin Core [dublincore.org] metadata elements in an out-of-date format. Completely useless, except for a couple of search engines so obscure and useless that I can't remember their names.