Upcoming Events

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

» 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 with Johannes Keizer & Caterina Caracciolo, Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN (FAO))

» 30 October: Metadata for Public Sector Administration (NISO/DCMI Webinar with Makx Dekkers, Consultant)

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

» 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

NISO/DCMI Webinar: Semantic Mashups Across Large, Heterogeneous Institutions: Experiences from the VIVO Service

2013-05-08, A NISO/DCMI Webinar with John Fereira will be held online at 1:00PM Eastern Time on 22 May 2013 (17:00 UTC - see World Clock: http://bit.ly/157qF2S). This webinar will present the perspectives of a software developer on the practicalities of building a high-quality Semantic-Web search service on existing data maintained in dozens of formats and software platforms at large, diverse institutions using Vivo, a semantic web application focused on discovering researchers and research publications in the life sciences. Using a built-in, editable ontology for describing things such as People, Courses, and Publications, data is transformed into a Semantic-Web-compliant form. VIVO provides automated and self-updating processes for improving data quality and authenticity. The webinar will highlight services that leverage the Semantic Web platform in innovative ways, e.g., for finding researchers based on the text content of a particular Web page and for visualizing networks of collaboration across institutions. Additional information can be found at http://www.niso.org/news/events/2013/dcmi/vivo/. Registration for the webinar closes 22 May 2013 at 12:00PM Eastern (16:00 UTC).

DC-2013 Session: Long-term Preservation and Governance of RDF Vocabularies

2013-04-17, The DC-2013 Special Session titled Long-term Preservation and Governance of RDF Vocabularies will be sponsored by W3C and will focuses on issues related to the usability of RDF vocabularies in the long term (as defined in "decades") including continued access to documentation, inheritance of ownership and maintenance responsibility, and the continued resolvability of domain names. The usability of Linked Data relies on the ability to interpret what the data means, which depends on the availability of the RDF vocabularies used in the data. RDF vocabularies are created by a wide range of people and institutions, from individual researchers to national libraries and for-profit corporations, for a wide range of descriptive requirements. The oldest RDF vocabularies in existence are just fifteen years old. It is time to look systematically at how ownership and responsibility for today's vocabularies will pass to the next generation. For a fuller description, see http://dcevents.dublincore.org/IntConf/index/pages/view/vocPres. DC-2013 will be held in Lisbon 2-6 September 2013. The conference website can be found at http://purl.org/dcevents/dc-2013.

DCMI Technical Updates

2013-02-28: Z39.85-2012 maintenance revision published
2012-06-14: DCMI Metadata Terms published with RDFa markup
2012-06-14: DCMI Metadata Terms available in multiple formats via content negotiation

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

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

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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