DCMI Metadata Terms

This document is an up-to-date, authoritative specification of all metadata terms maintained by the Dublin Core™ Metadata Initiative. Included are the fifteen terms of the Dublin Core™ Metadata Element Set (also known as "the Dublin Core") plus several dozen properties, classes, datatypes, and vocabulary encoding schemes. The "Dublin Core" plus these extension vocabularies are collectively referred to as "DCMI metadata terms" ("Dublin Core terms" for short). These terms are intended to be used in combination with metadata terms from other, compatible vocabularies in the context of application profiles.

DCMI metadata terms are expressed in RDF vocabularies for use in Linked Data. Creators of non-RDF metadata can use the terms in contexts such as XML, JSON, UML, or relational databases by disregarding both the global identifier and the formal implications of the RDF-specific aspects of term definitions. Such users can take domain, range, subproperty, and subclass relations as usage suggestions and focus on the natural-language text of definitions, usage notes, and examples.

Each term is identified with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), a global identifier usable in Linked Data. Term URIs resolve to the (DCMI Metadata Terms) document when selected in a browser or, when referenced programmatically by RDF applications, to one of four RDF schemas. The scope of each RDF schema corresponds to a "DCMI namespace", or set of DCMI metadata terms that are identified using a common base URI, as enumerated in the DCMI Namespace Policy. In Linked Data, the URIs for DCMI namespaces are often declared as prefixes in order to make data, queries, and schemas more concise and readable.

The four DCMI namespaces are:

• http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ The /elements/1.1/ namespace was created in 2000 for the RDF representation of the fifteen-element Dublin Core and has been widely used in data for more than twenty years. This namespace corresponds to the original scope of ISO 15836, which was published first in 2003 and last revised in 2017 as ISO 15836-1:2017 [ISO 15836-1:2017.
• http://purl.org/dc/terms/ The /terms/ namespace was originally created in 2001 for identifying new terms coined outside of the original fifteen-element Dublin Core. In 2008, in the context of defining formal semantic constraints for DCMI metadata terms in support of RDF applications, the original fifteen elements themselves were mirrored in the /terms/ namespace. As a result, there exists both a dc:date (http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/date) with no formal range and a corresponding dcterms:date (http://purl.org/dc/terms/date) with a formal range of "literal". While these distinctions are significant for creators of RDF applications, most users can safely treat the fifteen parallel properties as equivalent. The most useful properties and classes of DCMI Metadata Terms have now been published as ISO 15836-2:2019 [ISO 15836-2:2019]. While the /elements/1.1/ namespace will be supported indefinitely, DCMI gently encourages use of the /terms/ namespace.
• http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/ The /dcmitype/ namespace was created in 2001 for the DCMI Type Vocabulary, which defines classes for basic types of thing that can be described using DCMI metadata terms.
• http://purl.org/dc/dcam/ The /dcam/ namespace was created in 2008 for terms used in the description of DCMI metadata terms.

Each term is specified with the following minimal set of attributes:

Where applicable, the following attributes provide additional information about a term:

References