ABSTRACT
This entry is a personal remembrance of the emergence and evolution of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative from its inception in a 1994 invitational workshop to its current state as an international open standards community. It describes the context of resource description in the early days of the World Wide Web, and discusses both social and technical engineering brought to bear on its development. Notable in this development is the international character of the workshop and conference series, and the diverse spectrum of expertise from many countries that contributed to the effort. The Dublin Core began as a consensus-driven community that elaborated a set of resource description principles that served a broad spectrum of users and applications. The result has been an architecture for metadata that informs most Web-based resource description efforts. Equally important, the Dublin Core has become the leading community of expertise, practice, and discovery that continues to explore the borders between the ideal and the practical in the description of digital information assets.
