Does anyone bother with Dublin Core anymore?

Question

As the question states, is there any point adding Dublin Core meta-tags to your HTML head? Or has sitemap.org removed the use for most of this (though it only replaces some of the tags)

I ask this as most sites I visit don't seem to use DC metatags in their source.

I'm interested in whether I need them for a site that will be used mostly for developers, however the discussion can be broader than this category.

To quote Google (from 2002):

"Currently we don't trust metadata because we are afraid of it being manipulated"

Deniable

if you asked about DC in meta-tags for SEO purposes - yes, they are obsolete. – Belvia

Answer 1

Dublin Core is still very important in certain industry sectors. Here in the UK, government organisations use DC to provide standardised access to tags.

Mitman

Answer 2

I would rather say that the time of rich metadata hasn’t come yet. In fact technologies like RFD are just on the way up. Tim Berners-Lee – you know, the guy who invented the web – quite recently spoke at TED about The next Web of open, linked data. So Dublin Core and other metadata formats are anything but out.

Rightness

How much actual influence do you think TBL still has? – Timework

It’s not that TBL is the guru whose prediction we must follow. I just think it’s the next logical step. From the simple description of data in documents and simple links to richer semantics and relations between these documents. – Rightness

Well, the time for tokamak fusion hasn't come yet, either -- it's still 50 years away from commercial realization. I do hope semantic web initiatives aren't quite as farsighted... – Vierra

Answer 3

META tags are not the only place you can put DC metadata. You can integrate it more with HTML using RDFa.

Now, as for proliferation — well, the only incentive it currently gives to webmasters is satisfaction for job well done, but does not yet affect SEO. As soon as this changes, you'll see outburst of sites tagged with RDF and microformats. And it will come. Yahoo already started working on that: http://ysearchblog.com/2008/03/13/the-yahoo-search-open-ecosystem/

Nous

Answer 4

I was looking on the web for information about the Dublin Core and if search engines used them and I came across the academic paper "Search Engines and Resource Discovery on the Web: Is Dublin Core an Impact Factor?" by Mehdi Safari:

http://www.webology.ir/2005/v2n2/a13.html

To quote his conclusions section: "it was found that using Dublin Core elements did not improve the retrieval rank of the web pages" and that "Dublin Core metadata, as a well-known metadata schema, is not widely accepted and used by search engine designers and the spiders do not consider its elements while ranking the web pages".

This was back in 2005, but I am assuming this is still true.

Razorback

Answer 5

Semantic web efforts are still sputtering along. I've run across a couple of research efforts to use RDF triples including the Dublin Core... but nothing close to commercialization.

However, as a general organizing principle for the world wild web? Don't bother. My guess is that folksonomies will deal with some metadata management, but that site tagging will need to be handled through ontological deduction of some sort. I get the same feeling around DC and RDF that I get around general-purpose globally open UDDI registries: nice idea, but that's not the way the world works.

It would be kinda interesting to know whether DC tags increase your Google Page Rank (and how reliably): that could be a strong incitament for many!

Vierra

Actually if it would increase PR, surely it'll get abused as <meta> keywords tag. – Nous

Libraries use structured metadata like Dublin Core to catalog describe their Institutional Archives -- their collections of unpublished materials. – Electrodynamics

Answer 6

I was in the process of harmonizing my document templates: HTML (+CSS) and ODT (Open Document Template: content.xml, styles.xml, meta.xml, etc.). And was considering which metadata schema I should choose and when I saw that ODT is as well based on respective using DC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_technical_specification#meta.xml) it was clear to me that DC is the way to go. (It seems that DC is more cross-platform and wide spread than other metadata schema).

Chic