Featured Glossary Entry
Upcoming Events
» 23 January: Translating the Library Catalog from MARC into Linked Data: An Update on the Bibliographic Framework Initiative (NISO/DCMI Webinar with Eric Miller)
» 24 April: Deployment of RDA (Resource Description and Access): Cataloging and its Expression as Linked Data (NISO/DCMI Webinar with Alan Danskin & Gordon Dunsire)
» 22 May: Semantic Mashups Across Large, Heterogeneous Institutions: Experiences from the VIVO Service (NISO/DCMI Webinar with John Fereira)
» 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)
» 30 October: Metadata for Public Sector Administration (NISO/DCMI Webinar)
» 4 December: Cooperative Authority Control (NISO/DCMI Webinar)
» 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.
2012-12-18, A Working Draft of "Dublin Core to PROV Mapping" has been made available by W3C at http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-prov-dc-20121211/. The document provides a mapping between the PROV-O OWL2 ontology and the Dublin Core Terms Vocabulary. The Dublin Core Metadata Terms mapping document is part of the PROV family of documents defining various aspects that are necessary to achieve the vision of inter-operable interchange of provenance information in heterogeneous environments such as the Web.
2012-12-18, Ana Alice Baptista, Universidade do Minho of Braga, Portugal and Eva M. Méndez, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain have been named to the DC-2013 Conference Committee. Baptista will serve as Chair of the Tutorial Committee and Méndez will serve as a co-Chair of the Doctoral Symposium with a yet-to-be appointed co-Chair for the collocated meeting of IPRES. DC-2013 will be hosted by the Instituto Superior Técnico and take place 2-6 September 2013 in Lisbon, Portugal. Additional information is available on the conference website at http://purl.org/dcevents/dc-2013.
2012-11-28, A NISO/DCMI Webinar with Eric Miller will be held online at 1:00PM Eastern Time (18:00 UTC) on 23 January 2013. Registration for this webinar closes 23 January 2013 at 12:00PM Eastern (17:00 UTC). In May 2012, the Library of Congress announced a new modeling initiative focused on reflecting the MARC 21 library standard as a Linked Data model for the Web, with an initial model to be proposed by the consulting company Zepheira. The goal of the initiative is to translate the MARC 21 format to a Linked Data model while retaining the richness and benefits of existing data in the historical format. In this webinar, Eric Miller of Zepheira will report on progress towards this important goal, starting with an analysis of the translation problem and concluding with potential migration scenarios for a broad-based transition from MARC to a new bibliographic framework. Additional information can be found at http://www.niso.org/news/events/2013/dcmi/bibframework/.
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
DCMI Terms Technical Updates:DCMI Metadata Terms published with RDFa markup
2012-06-14, A maintenance release of DCMI Metadata Terms, published today, now includes HTML markup describing all of its properties, classes, datatypes, and vocabulary encoding schemes in machine-readable RDF in accordance with the new W3C RDFa Lite 1.1 specification. RDFa Lite 1.1, published as a W3C Recommendation on 7 June 2012, is the simplest variant of RDFa, a syntax for embedding structured data in Web pages. A Web page with RDFa provides -- in the same source document -- both the human-readable text rendered on-screen by browsers and the detailed machine-readable representation needed by Semantic Web applications. The publication software used by DCMI for the past decade was modified and extended to support RDFa by Hugh Barnes, Gregg Kellogg, and Mitsuharu Nagamori with help from Manu Sporny, Tom Baker, Dan Brickley, and Jon Phipps. All of the software and data used to generate this documentation is available from an open-source repository on GitHub. DCMI Metadata Terms available in multiple formats via content negotiation
2012-06-14, Following the W3C guidelines "Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies", documentation of DCMI's metadata terms may now be requested by Web browsers and software applications in several formats. For example, an RDF description of the DCMI property "Title" may be requested as a file in RDF/XML or Turtle syntax, via HTTP content negotiation, or as an HTML page with an RDF representation embedded in its markup using RDFa. Since March 2000, users navigating to the URI http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title in a Web browser have been shown a difficult-to-read RDF/XML schema. Browsers will now display a human-readable HTML document, and most browsers will take users to the spot in the page where the property "Title" is defined. DCMI's implementation of content negotiation was undertaken by Jon Phipps with assistance from Tom Baker and Jinho Park. Interested software implementers are invited to inspect, comment on, contribute to, or raise issues about the approach taken, which is fully documented in an open-source repository on GitHub. |
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