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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.

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 

Finding relevant information on the World Wide Web has become increasingly problematic due to the explosive growth of networked resources. The Dublin Core is a metadata element set intended to facilitate discovery of electronic resources.

See :   RFC 2413
          Dublin Core Metadata site

Element Descriptions

Following is the reference description of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set. Note that element have a descriptive name intended to convey a common semantic understanding of the element. A formal single-word label (expressed in all upper case) is specified to make the syntactic specification of elements simpler for encoding schemes.

• Title

Label: TITLE 
The name given to the resource by the CREATOR or PUBLISHER.
 
• Author or Creator

Label: CREATOR
The person or organization primarily responsible for creating the intellectual content of the resource. For example, authors in the case of written documents, artists, photographers, or illustrators in the case of visual resources.
 
• Subject and Keywords

Label: SUBJECT
The topic of the resource. Typically, subject will be expressed as keywords or phrases that describe the subject or content of the resource. The use of controlled vocabularies and formal classification schemas is encouraged.
 
• Description

Label: DESCRIPTION
A textual description of the content of the resource, including abstracts in the case of document-like objects or content descriptions in the case of visual resources.
 
• Publisher

Label: PUBLISHER
The entity responsible for making the resource available in its present form, such as a publishing house, a university department, or a corporate entity.
 
• Other Contributor

 Label: CONTRIBUTOR
A person or organization not specified in a CREATOR element who has made significant intellectual contributions to the resource but whose contribution is secondary to any person or organization specified in a CREATOR element (for example, editor, transcriber, and illustrator).
 
• Date

Label: DATE
The date the resource was made available in its present form. Recommended best practice is an 8 digit number in the form YYYY-MM-DD as defined in http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime , a profile of ISO 8601.
 
• Resource Type

Label: TYPE
The category of the resource, such as home page, novel, poem, working paper, technical report, essay, dictionary. For the sake of interoperability, TYPE should be selected from an enumerated list that is under development in the workshop series at the time of publication of this document. See the "Dublin Core Resource Type and Format Working Group" Web page for current thinking on the application of this element.
 
• Format

Label: FORMAT
The data format of the resource, used to identify the software and possibly hardware that might be needed to display or operate the resource. For the sake of interoperability, FORMAT should be selected from an enumerated list (still under development in the workshop series at the time of publication of this document).
 
• Resource Identifier

Label: IDENTIFIER
String or number used to uniquely identify the resource. Examples for networked resources include URLs and URNs (when implemented). Other globally-unique identifiers, such as International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) or other formal names would also be candidates for this element in the case of off-line resources.
 
• Source

Label: SOURCE
A string or number used to uniquely identify the work from which this resource was derived, if applicable. For example, a PDF version of a novel might have a SOURCE element containing an ISBN number for the physical book from which the PDF version was derived.
 
• Language

Label: LANGUAGE
Language(s) of the intellectual content of the resource. Where practical, the content of this field should coincide with RFC 1766.
 
• Relation

Label: RELATION
The relationship of this resource to other resources. The intent of this element is to provide a means to express relationships among resources that have formal relationships to others, but exist as discrete resources themselves. For example, images in a document, chapters in a book, or items in a collection. Formal specification of RELATION is currently under development. Users and developers should understand that use of this element is currently considered to be experimental.
 
• Coverage

Label: COVERAGE
The spatial and/or temporal characteristics of the resource. Formal specification of COVERAGE is currently under development. Users and developers should understand that use of this element is currently considered to be experimental.
 
• Rights Management

Label: RIGHTS
A link to a copyright notice, to a rights-management statement, or to a service that would provide information about terms of access to the resource. Formal specification of RIGHTS is currently under development. Users and developers should understand that use of this element is currently considered to be experimental.

• elements related mainly to the Content of the resource
• elements related mainly to the resource when viewed as Intellectual Property
• elements related mainly to the Instantiation of the resource.

Examples

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