Namespace Policy

The DCMI Namespace Policy, in 2001 among the first such policies of its kind to be articulated for any vocabulary, declares the principles by which DCMI Metadata Terms are identified and published as an RDF vocabulary. The namespace policy declares guidelines for maintenance changes to DCMI terms: The correction of editorial errata (e.g., updated URLs pointing to documentation external to DCMI) result in no changes to DCMI term URIs, while semantic changes judged likely to have a substantial impact on machine processing are supposed to trigger the creation of new terms with new URIs.