The International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications (DC‐2008) is being held this year in Berlin. The purpose of this paper is to describe the evolution of the Dublin Core effort from an initial focus on “core” elements for resource description towards a more comprehensive framework for developing application profiles that use multiple vocabularies on basis of the W3C resource description framework (RDF) model.
A Dublin Core application profile describes a metadata application, from functional requirements, via a domain model of entities to be described, to the formal specification of constraints on the basis of the DCMI Abstract Model.
Dublin Core application profiles are designed to be interoperable on the basis of W3C's RDF model and principles of Web architecture, such as consistent use of URIs, in order to facilitate the integration of metadata from multiple sources – a common requirement in today's Web.
The paper offers insights into the evolution of the Dublin Core.
