Metadata: Using Dublin Core on the web

Posted by Daniel Stout on Tue 13 May 2008 at 8:51 PM

Metadata is information about information. Metadata about a book might include the author, the title of the book, the publisher, number of pages, and so on. Metadata about a CD could include the date of release, the record label, the artist, etc. To describe a web page though there are multiple, conflicting standards about how to describe the attributes. One metadata standard that comes from the library world is called Dublin Core.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has been primarily responsible for producing the widely used DCMI Metadata Terms. These are basically the parameters allowed under Dublin Core to describe various types of objects such as books or web pages.

A crash course to getting Dublin Core working on your own web pages is to use an automated tool that can read your page and give you a starting set of values to work with. The tool, DC-dot, is the best way to get a quick start on codifying for a given page.

If you use a CMS or blogging software, you can automate the insertion of the Dublin Core metadata into each of your pages — using the template tools for your platform to insert custom description and keyword information.

There are different ways to render the metadata, such as HTML meta tags or RDF. To give you an idea of the type of information that can be encoded, here’s an example of the metadata from the front page from Manufactured Environments.

<link rel=”schema.DC” href=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/” />
<link rel=”schema.DCTERMS” href=”http://purl.org/dc/terms/” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”culture, music, linux, poetry, mp3, entertainment, books, philosophy, podcast, pdfcast, arts, opinion, environments, opensuse, manufactured, daniel stout” />
<meta name=”description” content=”Manufactured Environments is a blog about technology, music, vinyl, turntables and more.” />
<meta name=”DC.title” lang=”en” content=”Manufactured Environments” />
<meta name=”DC.creator” content=”Daniel Stout” />
<meta name=”DC.subject” lang=”en” content=”culture; music; linux; poetry; mp3; entertainment; books; philosophy; podcast; pdfcast; arts; opinion; environments; opensuse; manufactured; daniel stout” />
<meta name=”DC.description” lang=”en” content=”Manufactured Environments is a blog about technology, music, vinyl, turntables and more.” />
<meta name=”DC.publisher” content=”Daniel Stout” />
<meta name=”DC.date” scheme=”DCTERMS.W3CDTF” content=”2008-05-05” />
<meta name=”DC.type” scheme=”DCTERMS.DCMIType” content=”Text” />
<meta name=”DC.format” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8” />
<meta name=”DC.identifier” scheme=”DCTERMS.URI” content=”http://manufacturedenvironments.com/” />
<meta name=”DC.language” scheme=”DCTERMS.RFC1766” content=”en-US” />
<meta name=”DC.rights” content=”This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/” />

Tags: dcmi · dublin core · metadata · web

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