Maintaining dublin core as a semantic web vocabulary

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) maintains a vocabulary of several dozen metadata terms, notably the fifteen-element "Dublin Core." These terms (and their historical versions) are identified with URI references, described in Web documents and machine-processable schemas, indexed in registries, cited in application profiles, and of course used in metadata records. Within DCMI, however, the emphasis has been less on growing this small vocabulary than on clarifying how the DCMI vocabulary can "play well" with other, complementary vocabularies in a Semantic Web that recombines semantics from multiple sources for specialized purposes. This priority has led DCMI to examine models for referencing other vocabularies and to clarify the modeling bases for interoperability among heterogeneous systems.