In the previous post, I talked about including geographical information in your metadata. This post continues on by looking at standardizing on metadata information for websites.

In 1995, a workshop took place in Dublin, Ohio and the objective was to develop interoperable metadata standards. The Organization that came out of that workshop is called the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI).

The element set is extensive, and shown below. The details of of it can be found here.
http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/

Element List
DC.contributor
DC.coverage
DC.creator
DC.date
DC.description
DC.format
DC.identifier
DC.language
DC.publisher
DC.relation
DC.rights
DC.source
DC.title
DC.type

There aren’t many sites that use these tags. Part of reason is because of the slow adoption of this standard from the popular search engines. With the continuous updates I make on appsforthewin.com, I look at the source code of every site in order to grab a description and rarely find one using these tags.

Campaign Monitor, which was featured on Apps For The Win in December 10, 2009 was one site that did use these tags. Below is an extract of that code for example purposes.

The Dublin Core is currently being used by educational organizations, libraries, government institutions, the scientific research sector, web developers, businesses requiring more searchable sites and corporations with vast knowledge management systems. Some search engines have already began to adopt this standard. Although, most search engines will take some more time to go this path. This is because search engines don’t index the metadata found in sites due to server trustworthiness.

As of today, according to the DCMI site, the search engines currently supporting the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set are

Ultraseek
Swish-E
Microsoft’s Index Server
Blue Angel Technologies MetaStar
Verity Search 97 Information Server

In the end, it doesn’t hurt and you don’t want to standardize too late in the game.