DublinCore

Dublin Core is a metadata standard designed to describe digital and physical resources to support discovery and retrieval. It originated from a collaborative effort among libraries, archives, and information science professionals in Dublin, Ireland, and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) was established in 1995 to develop and maintain the standard. The core set, known as Simple Dublin Core, consists of 15 elements intended to be broadly applicable across domains. A more expressive form, Qualified Dublin Core, adds refinements and encoding schemes to qualify elements and relationships. In addition, Dublin Core Terms (DCTERMS) provides a richer set of properties for use with RDF.

Elements include: Title, Creator, Subject, Description, Publisher, Contributor, Date, Type, Format, Identifier, Source, Language, Relation, Coverage, Rights. These elements can be used alone or together to describe a resource’s content, provenance, and access rights. Dublin Core is formalized in ISO 15836 and is widely implemented in library catalogs, repositories, museums, and government portals, often enabling interoperability through mappings to other metadata schemas and across platforms. It is commonly expressed in RDF, XML, or embedded in HTML metadata, and is used to support resource discovery, metadata harvesting, and repository interoperability.