DCMI About Us

Mission and Principles

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative provides core metadata vocabularies in support of interoperable solutions for discovering and managing resources.

DCMI does this by:

Providing open access to education, training and documentation resources related to innovative design and metadata best practices
Supporting a worldwide community of people working with metadata to share experiences and find common solutions through collaborative tools, publications and meetings
Promoting co-operation, and interoperability across standards and vocabularies, by engaging with other organizations and communities
Developing and maintaining the DCMI metadata vocabularies and promoting their use in conjunction with other vocabularies for describing resources

DCMI's principles of operation are:

Open consensus building: Participation in the DCMI community is open to all interested groups or individuals with expertise in metadata. DCMI standards and documents reflect consensus arrived at through consultative debate and review. No 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 in the 1990s from an informal workshop series that attracted participation of a world-wide community. DCMI has been committed from the start to to global participation, as exemplified by a wide array of translations, the location of Dublin Core Conferences, and the diversity of regional representation among the DCMI Members and in the Oversight Committee and Advisory Board.
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: Since its early days in the mid-1990s, DCMI's founding principle has been the discovery of resources across the boundaries of information silos on the Web and within intranets.

Governance

The governance and operation structure of DCMI is formalized through a set of by-laws defining the membership, responsibilities, selection and appointment process, terms, decision process, communication and documentation, and reporting procedures for all committees. Participants in DCMI include:

the DCMI Executive, which is responsible for the day-to-day running of the Initiative.
the DCMI Oversight Committee, which oversees the activities of DCMI and its Executive and contributes to the promotion of the Initiative through liaisons with the public and private sectors.
DCMI Members (see logos below), which are the legal members of the Company limited by Guarantee. These national or regional organizations provide a link between DCMI as a worldwide activity and the local and regional activities of practitioners, supporting the adoption of Dublin Core specifications within their regions and helping to raise local concerns in the larger global metadata community.
DCMI Partners, organizations that provide financial support to DCMI and its activities.
the DCMI Usage Board, a committee chartered to ensure the orderly evolution of the metadata terms maintained by DCMI and to evaluate application profiles based on Dublin Core terms and principles.
the DCMI Advisory Board, comprised of people involved in the management of specific activities and invited experts, which gives advice on technical and strategic issues that occur during the operation of DCMI and to liaise with the stakeholder community and other global metadata initiatives.
the DCMI Communities and Task Groups, which provide discussion and cooperation platforms for specific communities (e.g., education, government information, corporate knowledge management) or specific interests (e.g., technical architecture, accessibility). Read more...

DCMI maintains liaisons and relationships with other organizations.

Web site, policies, software, logo, banner

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

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.

Over the years, DCMI has developed several software applications to generate and manage machine-readable representations of metadata: a metadata registry application (in Full and Lite versions), a Vocabulary Management Tool, and a tool for extracting structured representations of application profiles from MoinMoin wiki pages. The source code for these software applications is freely available for interested users under DCMI open source licenses.

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.

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.