| All documents and media managed by viaContext™ have a metadata attachment to improve maintenance and search on these documents and media. The internationally accepted metadata standard Dublin Core serves as a basis for this metadata attachment. However, field-specific enhancements are possible. |
| The Dublin Core is a metadata element set intended to facilitate discovery of electronic resources. Originally conceived for author-generated description of Web resources, it has attracted the attention of formal resource description communities such as libraries, healthcare, government agencies, and commercial organisations. |
| While it is some ways a least common denominator of metadata, its simplicity allows it to be used in a variety of settings and without the extensive training required to deal with other metadata standards such as EAD or USMARC. The characteristics of the Dublin Core: |
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| Simplicity |
| The Dublin Core is intended to be usable by non-cataloguers as well as resource description specialists. Most of the elements have a commonly understood semantics of roughly the complexity of a library catalogue card. |
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| Semantic Interoperability |
| In the Internet Commons, disparate description models interfere with the ability to search across discipline boundaries. Promoting a commonly understood set of descriptors that helps to unify other data content standards increases the possibility of semantic interoperability across disciplines. |
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| International Consensus |
| Recognition of the international scope of resource discovery on the Web is critical to the development of effective discovery infrastructure. The Dublin Core benefits from active participation and promotion in some 20 countries in Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia. |
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| Extensibility |
| The Dublin Core provides an economical alternative to more elaborate description models such as the full MARC cataloguing of the library world. Additionally, it includes sufficient flexibility and extensibility to encode the structure and more elaborate semantics inherent in richer description standards |
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| Continue with the Descriptions of the Dublin Core Elements |
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