Dublin Core Metadata for Resource Discovery
RFC 2413
Document | Type |
RFC - Informational
(September 1998; No errata)
Obsoleted by RFC 5013
Was draft-kunze-dc (individual)
|
|
---|---|---|---|
Authors | Misha Wolf , John Kunze , Carl Lagoze , Stuart Weibel | ||
Last updated | 2013-03-02 | ||
Stream | Legacy | ||
Formats | plain text html pdf htmlized bibtex | ||
Stream | Legacy state | (None) | |
Consensus Boilerplate | Unknown | ||
RFC Editor Note | (None) | ||
IESG | IESG state | RFC 2413 (Informational) | |
Telechat date | |||
Responsible AD | (None) | ||
Send notices to | (None) |
Network Working Group S. Weibel Request for Comments: 2413 OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. Category: Informational J. Kunze University of California, San Francisco C. Lagoze Cornell University M. Wolf Reuters Limited September 1998 Dublin Core Metadata for Resource Discovery 1. Status of this Memo This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1998). All Rights Reserved. 2. Abstract The Dublin Core Metadata Workshop Series began in 1995 with an invitational workshop which brought together librarians, digital library researchers, content experts, and text-markup experts to promote better discovery standards for electronic resources. The Dublin Core is a 15-element set of descriptors that has emerged from this effort in interdisciplinary and international consensus building. This is the first of a set of Informational RFCs describing the Dublin Core. Its purpose is to introduce the Dublin Core and to describe the consensus reached on the semantics of each of the 15 elements. 3. Introduction Finding relevant information on the World Wide Web has become increasingly problematic due to the explosive growth of networked resources. Current Web indexing evolved rapidly to fill the demand for resource discovery tools, but that indexing, while useful, is a poor substitute for richer varieties of resource description. An invitational workshop held in March of 1995 brought together librarians, digital library researchers, and text-markup specialists to address the problem of resource discovery for networked resources. Weibel, et. al. Informational [Page 1] RFC 2413 Dublin Core Metadata for Resource Discovery September 1998 This activity evolved into a series of related workshops and ancillary activities that have become known collectively as the Dublin Core Metadata Workshop Series. The goals that motivate the Dublin Core effort are: - Simplicity of creation and maintenance - Commonly understood semantics - Conformance to existing and emerging standards - International scope and applicability - Extensibility - Interoperability among collections and indexing systems These requirements work at cross purposes to some degree, but all are desirable goals. Much of the effort of the Workshop Series has been directed at minimizing the tensions among these goals. One of the primary deliverables of this effort is a set of elements that are judged by the collective participants of these workshops to be the core elements for cross-disciplinary resource discovery. The term "Dublin Core" applies to this core of descriptive elements. Early experience with Dublin Core deployment has made clear the need to support qualification of elements for some applications. Thus, a Dublin Core element may be expressed without qualification (as described in this RFC) or with qualifiers that refine its semantics (the subject of future RFCs). For the sake of interoperability, simple indexing and discovery tools should be able to ignore any qualifiers provided, while more advanced, semantically richer tools should be able to use qualifiers to support more specialized or precise discovery. The broad agreements about syntax and semantics that have emerged from the workshop series will be expressed in a series of Informational RFCs, of which this document is the first. 4. Description of Dublin Core Elements The following is the reference definition of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set. Further information about the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set is available at [1]: http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core In the element descriptions below, each element has a descriptive name intended to convey a common semantic understanding of the element, as well as a formal single-word label intended to make the syntactic specification of elements simpler for encoding schemes. Weibel, et. al. Informational [Page 2] RFC 2413 Dublin Core Metadata for Resource Discovery September 1998 Although some environments, such as HTML, are not case-sensitive, it is recommended best practice always to adhere to the case conventions in the element labels given below to avoid conflicts in the eventShow full document text