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About the Initiative

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is an open organization, incorporated in Singapore as a public, not-for-profit Company limited by Guarantee (registration number 200823602C), engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models. DCMI's activities include work on architecture and modeling, discussions and collaborative work in DCMI Communities and DCMI Task Groups, annual conferences and workshops, standards liaison, and educational efforts to promote widespread acceptance of metadata standards and practices.

Mission and Scope

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative provides simple standards to facilitate the finding, sharing and management of information.

DCMI does this by:

• Developing and maintaining international standards for describing resources
• Supporting a worldwide community of users and developers
• Promoting widespread use of Dublin Core solutions

The major characteristics of DCMI as an organization are (the three ‘I’s):

• Independent: DCMI is not controlled by specific commercial or other interests and is not biased towards specific domains nor does it mandate specific technical solutions
• International: DCMI encourages participation from organizations anywhere in the world, respecting linguistic and cultural differences
• Influenceable: DCMI is an open organization aiming at building consensus among the participating organizations; there are no prerequisites for participation

The development and maintenance of a core set of metadata terms (the DCMI Metadata Terms) continues to be one of the main activities of DCMI. In addition, DCMI is developing guidelines and procedures to help implementers define and describe their usage of Dublin Core metadata in the form of Application Profiles. This work is done in a work structure that provides discussion and cooperation platforms for specific communities (e.g. education, government information, corporate knowledge management) or specific interests (e.g. technical architecture, accessibility).

Anyone wishing to participate may do so by simply joining the appropriate mailing list for the activity of interest. The DC-General mailing list is the general forum for community participation and announcements. Feedback can be submitted through the feedback page.

DCMI By-laws

The governance and operation structure of DCMI is formalized through a set of By-laws. These by-laws define the membership, responsibilities, selection and appointment process, terms, decision process, communication and documentation, and reporting for all committees.

DCMI Executive

The DCMI Executive takes care of the day-to-day running of the organization. The Executive consist of a Managing Director/Chief Execuctive Officer and a Chief Inforamtion Officer.

DCMI Oversight Committee

The DCMI Oversight Committee oversees the activities of the DCMI and its Executive. It advises the Managing Director on strategic issues and allocation of financial resources, contributes to the promotion of the Initiative through liaisons with the public and private sectors and assists in securing support for the Initiative.

DCMI Members

DCMI Members are the legal members of the Company limited by Guarantee. The are national or regional organizations that provide a link between the DCMI as a worldwide activity and the local and regional activities of practitioners. They promote and support the adoption of Dublin Core specifications within their region and help to raise local concerns in the larger global metadata community.

DCMI Partners

DCMI Partners are organizations that provide financial support to DCMI. The Partnership program includes options to provide financial support to DCMI as a whole, or to support specific activities or events.

DCMI Usage Board

The DCMI Usage Board is a committee chartered to ensure the orderly evolution of the metadata terms maintained by DCMI. The Usage Board evaluates proposals for new terms (or changes to existing terms) in light of grammatical principle, semantic clarity, usefulness, and overlap with existing terms. To proposals that are accepted it assigns a specific status. The Usage Board also evaluates constructs that use DCMI terms, such as Application Profiles. The Usage Board strives for consensus, justifying its decisions and interpretations in terms both of principle and of empirical practice.

DCMI Advisory Board

The DCMI Advisory Board is comprised of people involved in the management of specific activities and invited experts. The Advisory Board gives advice on all technical and strategic issues that occur during the operation of the DCMI. It has a dual role in the DCMI: an internal role to assist in and advise on the developments that take place within DCMI, and an external role to liaise with the stakeholder community and other global metadata initiatives. It has an important role in reviewing charters and activities with specific emphasis on recognizing and signaling potential conflicts between activities, suggesting specific coordination between different groups, and proposing specific contacts with individuals, groups or organizations outside DCMI.

Community

The DCMI is built on a community of individuals from many different backgrounds and disciplines located in organizations and institutions all over the world. Participants can subscribe to the open mailing lists of one or more DCMI Communities or request membership of one of the DCMI Task Groups.

Principles of Operation

The diversity of DCMI participants is great, spanning more than 50 countries, and representing many sectors, including governments, libraries, museums, archives, commercial enterprises, research and education communities, and more. Finding common ground and consensus amid such diversity is an ongoing challenge. DCMI has, since its inception, retained the interest of such a community through adherence to the principles of operation enumerated here.

• Open consensus building. DCMI is open to participation to all interested parties and stakeholders. Any individual or group with expertise in metadata is welcome to participate in the DCMI community by contributing ideas through joining the DCMI Architecture Forum, DCMI Communities or Task Groups, subscribing to DCMI mailing lists, and attending meetings or plenary conferences. DCMI standards and documents reflect consensus arrived at through consultative debate and review. DCMI aggregates and makes available intellectual property of its many participants in the form of standards and documentation, but no charges or fees are assessed for use of such information, inasmuch as the value of such materials is enhanced by their wide adoption.
• International Scope and participation. DCMI arose from an informal, international workshop series that has attracted participation of a world-wide community. While debate and review of DCMI standards is carried out largely in the English language, the Initiative is founded on a commitment to international, multilingual representation of its standards. This commitment is exemplified by the wide array of translations of DCMI standards and documentations, the diversity of venues for Dublin Core Workshops and Conferences. The DCMI Members, Oversight Committee and Advisory Board each have diverse representation from many countries.
• Neutrality of purposes and business models. DCMI is neutral as to the purposes for which DCMI metadata standards might be used, and encourages the adoption of these standards in the public and private sectors.
• Neutrality of technology. DCMI standards are fundamentally concerned with semantics — the meaning of assertions about information resources. The technological infrastructure underpinning the encoding and expression of these semantics is expected to evolve with time. DCMI attempts to maintain independence of agreed-upon semantics, and to facilitate the expression of these semantics in encoding idioms appropriate to the active stakeholders of the initiative.
• Cross disciplinary focus. Cross-disciplinary discovery is a major founding principle of DCMI and remains the primary focus of the initiative. Promoting interoperability and adoption of DCMI metadata across disciplines often requires refinements and extensions to basic metadata sets. DCMI promotes and facilitates such activities in the interest of increasing the likelihood of interoperability and coherence in the realm of metadata.

DCMI Work Structure

There are three types of groups that constiture the work structure of DCMI: The DCMI Architecture Forum, DCMI Communities and DCMI Task Groups. The procedures of these groups are described in the document Operational aspects of DCMI Work structure: Communities and Task Groups. Participation in these groups is open to all DCMI participants with the interest, expertise, and time to contribute to the solution of problems.

The approval processes related to various types of documents published and maintained by DCMI is described in "Procedure for approval of proposals by DCMI".

Links to DCMI Process Documents are available from the DCMI Documents page.

DCMI Workshop and Conference Series

Since 1995, the Dublin Core Workshop Series has attracted experts from numerous information-based communities to participate in the evolution and maintenance of Dublin Core metadata. The goal of the DCMI workshops is to promote consensus within the larger metadata community while incorporating the combined wisdom and collective experience of the DCMI's membership into the design of metadata elements, related refinements, and discipline-specific extensions, all within a coherent architecture that supports world-wide information discovery.

In 2001, the Workshop format was broadened to include a tutorial track and a conference paper/poster track in addition to the working meetings that characterized the earlier workshops. The series is now called "The International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications"; the proceedings are published as part of the DCMI Conference Papers. The venue for the annual conference is rotated among the Americas, Europe, and Austral-Asia to promote world-wide participation.

The DCMI Web Site

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Web Site is the major public entry point to the Dublin Core and the formal repository for all DCMI documentation, including current and past activities and meetings.

Mailing Lists

The DC-General mailing list has served as the central forum for DCMI issues since the second Dublin Core workshop. The list continues to be the primary venue for broad community discussion of DCMI recommendations and announcements of planned DCMI events.

Additional mailing lists are maintained for all specific activities carried out by DCMI.

DCMI Standards

DCMI promotes the adoption of standardized approaches to metadata and the architectures which support the creation and exchange of interoperable metadata. As evidence of this, DCMI metadata has successfully pursued standardization in various national and international standards venues, including the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and the US National Information Standards Organization (NISO).

In addition to these efforts, Dublin Core has been incorporated into, or acknowledged by, a variety of national standards and government metadata initiatives. DCMI will continue to work towards broad international recognition of consensus based metadata agreements that support the goal of world-wide metadata interoperability.

Policies

The DCMI seeks to attract the individuals and organizations worldwide interested in collaborating on metadata standards as well as the design and development of enabling metadata technologies. To this end, the DCMI has established the following policies.

• Copyright Statement
• Privacy Statement

About our logo

The DCMI logo consists of a central sphere, representing the core of the Initiative. The inner surrounding spheres represent the original 15 core data elements available in the DCMI Metadata Element Set (ISO standard 15836). The outer spheres represent an interpreted and extended element set.

Banner

The following banner is provided in the GIF file format for use by members of the public who wish to include them on a Web site.

No special permission is required from the DCMI to reproduce this image. However, the banner must be linked directly to the DCMI Web site at <http://dublincore.org/>.

Please let us know if you are using this banner on a web site by sending a message with your name and the URL of the web site to the address listed on the feedback page.