A Grammar of Dublin Core

Dublin Core as a Language. Dublin Core is often presented as a modern form of catalog card -a set of elements (and now qualifiers) that describe resources in a complete package. Sometimes it is proposed as an exchange format for sharing records among multiple collections. The founding principle that "every element is optional and repeatable" reinforces the notion that a Dublin Core description is to be taken as a whole. This paper, in contrast, is based on a much different premise: Dublin Core is a language. More precisely, it is a small language for making a particular class of statements about resources. Like natural languages, it has a vocabulary of word-like terms, the two classes of which -elements and qualifiers -function within statements like nouns and adjectives [1]; and it has a syntax for arranging elements and qualifiers into statements according to a simple pattern [2].