International Conference on Dublin Core & Metadata Applications

This year, the Annual Meeting & Conference of DCMI (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative) is being held in São Paulo, Brazil, at the Universidade Estadual Paulista, on 1-4 September 2015. The work agenda is broad and inclusive of all aspects of innovation in metadata design, implementation and best practices.

The need for structured metadata to support ubiquitous access across the Web to the treasure troves of resources spanning arts, sciences and the digital humanities is now common knowledge among information systems' designers and implementers. Structured metadata expressed through languages of description make it possible for us to “speak” of the contents of our treasure troves. But, like all human languages, our languages of description both enable and isolate.

The push to break out of the isolation of the metadata silos in which professionals inevitably design, implement and manage metadata, due to the need to discover the intersections of our treasure troves, drives much of today's discourse and emerging practice in metadata. The emergence of massively integrated Web presences such as Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), along with the global reshaping of public access through mechanisms such as Linked Data and schema.org, drives our conversations, our excitement and our fears.

The Annual DCMI Meeting & Conference provides the opportunity for DCMI "citizens" as well as newcomers, students, apprentices and early career professionals to gather face-to-face to share experiences. In addition, the event offers to public-and-private-sector initiatives, which are doing significant metadata work, the occasion to come together to compare notes and cast a broader light into their particular metadata work silos. DCMI advances this way its "first goal" of promoting metadata interoperability and harmonisation.

DCMI is an open organisation supporting shared innovation in metadata design and best practices across a broad range of purposes and business models.

DCMI does this by:

• managing long-term curation and development of DCMI specifications and metadata terms namespaces;


• managing ongoing discussion of current DCMI-wide work themes;


• setting up and managing international and regional events;


• curation and open availability of meeting assets including proceedings, project reports and meeting minutes;


• creation and delivery of training resources in metadata best practices including tutorials, webinars and workshops;


• coordinating the global community of DCMI volunteers.