Dublin Core

The Dublin Core Schema is a small set of vocabulary terms that can be used to describe web resources (video, images, web pages, etc.), as well as physical resources such as books or CDs, and objects like artworks. The full set of Dublin Core metadata terms can be found on the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) website. The original set of 15 classic metadata terms, known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set are endorsed in the following standards documents:

Dublin Core Metadata may be used for multiple purposes, from simple resource description, to combining metadata vocabularies of different metadata standards, to providing interoperability for metadata vocabularies in the Linked Data cloud and Semantic Web implementations.

"Dublin" refers to Dublin, Ohio, USA where the schema originated during the 1995 invitational OCLC/NCSA Metadata Workshop, hosted by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a library consortium based in Dublin, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). "Core" refers to the metadata terms as "broad and generic being usable for describing a wide range of resources". The semantics of Dublin Core were established and are maintained by an international, cross-disciplinary group of professionals from librarianship, computer science, text encoding, museums, and other related fields of scholarship and practice.

Starting in 2000, the Dublin Core community focused on "application profiles" – the idea that metadata records would use Dublin Core together with other specialized vocabularies to meet particular implementation requirements. During that time, the World Wide Web Consortium's work on a generic data model for metadata, the Resource Description Framework (RDF), was maturing. As part of an extended set of DCMI Metadata Terms, Dublin Core became one of the most popular vocabularies for use with RDF, more recently in the context of the Linked Data movement.

...
Wikipedia