Introduction and Specifications
The DCMI community has been managing and developing the Dublin Core Specifications for over 20 years and is committed to the continued development and maintenance of its standards.
Dublin Core is probably the most rudimentary of all metadata standards and provides fundamental, standardized building blocks for the description of digital objects on the Internet. The standard contains 15 so-called ‘core elements‘ for the description of metadata:
- dc:contributor
- dc:coverage
- dc:creator
- dc:date
- dc:description
- dc:format
- dc:identifier
- dc:language
- dc:publisher
- dc:relation
- dc:rights
- dc:source
- dc:subject
- dc:title
- dc:type
In the ‘DCMI Metadata Terms’ additional fields are defined in the dcterms-Namespace, which are oriented to the special needs of the users and extend the standard. There are four namespaces in total in the ‘DCMI Metadata Terms’:
- http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/: This namespace contains the original 15 Dublin Core elements
- http://purl.org/dc/terms/: This namespace was created in 2001 as an extension and contains the added elements for further semantic indexing.
- http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/: DCMI-Type was created for identification and definition of certain object types.
- http://purl.org/dc/dcam/: This namespace is used to describe the DCMI Metadata elements.
The Dublin Core™ Metadata Initiative provides access to schemas defining DCMI term declarations represented in various schema languages. Schemas are machine-processable specifications which define the structure and syntax of metadata specifications in a formal schema language. The schemas currently available can be found under:
Additional Material
Dublin Core is the most common metadata standard, used by many institutions and built upon for furthergoing standards. Therefore, there are many information resources about Dublin Core online. The following are simply recommendations and useful links:
- Definition der Universität Augsburg (de)
- DNB Dublin Core Leifaden (de)
- Learning Resources from the DCMI Community (en)
- The Dublin Core (PDF) (en)
- Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML (en)
Mandatory Fields for Europeana
| (1) dc:description | (7) dc:subject |
| (2) dc:language | (8) dcterms:rightsHolder |
| (3) dc:title | (9) dcterms:isReferencedBy |
| (4) dc:type | (10) dcterms:references |
| (5) dcterms:spatial | (11) dcterms:license You need to use the URI of one of the available rights statement listed here. |
| (6) dcterms:temporal |
Recommended Fields for Europeana
| (1) dc:creator | (3) dc:publisher |
| (2) dc:identifier | (4) dcterms:created |