[thelist] Dublin Core metadata standard

Karl Fast Karl Fast <karl.fast at pobox.com>
Thu, 2 Dec 1999 11:07:18 -0600 

> "The simple HTML 'keywords' and 'description' metatags are
> only used on the homepages of 34% of sites. Only 0.3% of
> sites use the Dublin Core metadata standard."
> 
> This is interesting to me because, frankly, I'd never heard of
> this Dublin Core metadata standard.  So, I hit a search engine
> ("85% of users use search engines to find information"), and
> found the homepage of this standard, the Dublin Core Metadata
> Initiative (http://purl.oclc.org/dc/).


Dublin Core is an attempt to define a common set of metadata that is
broad enough to be usable on the Internet. Right now the only
standard metadata fields we have for the web is title, description,
and keywords (OK, some of use generator, date, author, and others,
but these aren't formalized anywhere that I know of). DC goes beyond
that and defines 15 core elements (at least, I think it's 15).

Note that DC is about metadata, not meta tags. Meta tags are simply
how you implement and define metadata in HTML. People tend to use
these 2 terms interchangeably and it causes plenty of confusion.

A document that has DC metadata fields for title, creator, and date
would then have the following HTML meta tags in the <HEAD> section:

  <META NAME="DC.Title"   CONTENT="Beloved">
  <META NAME="DC.Creator" CONTENT="Morrison, Toni"> 
  <META NAME="DC.Date"    CONTENT="1986">

A good summary of how to implement DC in HTML can be found at the DC
site:

  A User guide for Simple Dublin Core
  http://purl.oclc.org/dc/documents/working_drafts/wd-guide-current.htm


The Dublin Core Home page is here:

  The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
  http://purl.oclc.org/dc/


Dublin Core was recently made an IETF recommendation (RFC 2413). The
RFC can be found here:

  Dublin Core Metadata for Resource Discovery
  http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2413.txt


Builder.com has a summary on DC that might prove useful.

  The Dublin Core         
  by Mikko Aarnio         
  March 30, 1999, Builder.com         
  http://www.builder.com/Authoring/RW/033099/?st.bl.fd.ts4.rw.1645 



hope this helps,
karl


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Karl Fast