Dublin Core defines

Dublin core itself defines 15 metadata elements (metadata is just data about data)

  1. Title
  2. Creator
  3. Subject
  4. Description
  5. Publisher
  6. Contributor
  7. Date
  8. Type
  9. Format
  10. Identifier
  11. Source
  12. Language
  13. Relation
  14. Coverage
  15. Rights

These elements can be omitted or used many times, which really makes things flexible

Date

There are a number of different accepted formats for the date. In the UK, it's DD-MM-YYYY, in the US it is MM-DD-YYYY and over at w3c, it's YYYY-MM-DD. Other accepted methods are the human readable 13th April 2011 form (or again, April 13th 2011). This is a bit of a pain, but happily as there is only one that is standard across the world (w3c), it is accepted to use this

Markup

To use the Dublin Core code, a property called "dcterms" has to be used. To code up the date, the following markup would be used

[1]<StatementTemplate ID="dateCreated" type="literal">
[2]<Property>http://purl.org/dc/terms/created<Property>
[3]<LiteralConstraint>
[4]<SyntaxEncodingScheme>http://purl.org/dc/terms/W3CDTF
[5]</SyntaxEncodingScheme>
[6]</LiteralConstraint>
[7]</StatementTemplate>

But what does it mean?

ID="dateCreated" - simply an identifier for the element, it is linked via the Property tag
type="literal" - sets the element type to be a free text string
Property - a creation date (in this example)
SyntaxEncodingScheme - the format for the date (DTF == date time format)

Is it really that simple?

For the most part, yes. The problem comes though with the author and if more than one entry is allowed. The number of entries allowed are simple enough parameters - minOccurs and maxOccurs. If minOccurs is set at zero, it is taken as being an optional parameter. maxOccurs can be any number, including "infinite".

The author is more of a problem as an author's name has the forename and the family name and there is nothing in DC that covers this. Here, a new template is defined (call it "authorName") which calls on the FOAF (friend of a friend) system which does include the elements for the author details (in this case givenName and familyName)

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