Practical Application of the Dublin Core Standard for Enterprise Metadata Management

Abstract

EDITOR'S SUMMARYLarge organizations relying heavily on knowledge work require effective capture and reuse of information, enabled through consistent use of standardized enterprise content metadata. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has undertaken a standardization effort, building an internal content schema based on established metadata field standards that are content‐ and application‐agnostic but locally customizable for application to a broad variety of repositories. The JPL adopted the Dublin Core standard, with its Simple and Qualified properties as well as further refined Custom sub‐properties. The JPL Resource Schema serves as an enterprise‐wide metadata standard, while specific application profiles state the available fields and field labels for each repository or content management system. The schema's terms are drawn from two distinct but semantically related vocabularies and linked by an intermediary registry tying granular listings for specific applications to enterprise‐level terms. The registry mappings permit the use of both local metadata and higher level or external systems. The effort has demonstrated the importance of consistent application of both granular and general metadata for information capture and revealed important lessons about adopting the Dublin Core standard in a large enterprise setting.