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The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is an organization dedicated to promoting the widespread adoption of interoperable metadata standards. The DCMI is built on a community of individuals from many different backgrounds and disciplines located in organizations and institutions all over the world. The original workshop for the Initiative was held in Dublin, Ohio in 1995. Hence the term "Dublin Core" in the name of the Initiative. The Dublin Core has become an important part of the emerging infrastructure of the Internet. Many communities are eager to adopt a common core of semantics for resource description, and the Dublin Core has attracted broad ranging international and interdisciplinary support for this purpose
The interdisciplinary Dublin Core metadata effort is considered by many to be the most obvious metadata scheme for facilitating the discovery of information in an interdisciplinary environment. It is generally agreed to be the leading scheme for achieving the goal of simple resource description for Internet resources. In contrast to other schemes that target particular types of materials and particular user communities, DCMES can be used to describe nearly any type of information resource.
One of the basic functions of the Dublin Core is the description of the contents of web pages. It consists of fifteen elements which can be categorised into the following;
The content items include title, subject, description, source, language,
relation, and coverage.
The intellectual elements consist of creator, publisher, contributor, and
rights.
The instantiation elements are date, type, format, and identifier.
The Dublin Core standard has received NISO (National Information Standard Organisation) approval and as of October 2001 is an official ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standard (Z39.85-2001).
From this point on, the element set will be referred to as the Irish Public Service Metadata Element Set (IPSMES).
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