The Dublin Core sounds like a really cool Irish drum-and-bass
group or something. But it's not! It's a crazy ass
metadata specification for EVERYTHING on the Web. Crazy!
I dunno what it is, but for some reason everybody's crazy about METADATA this
season. It's the crazy buzzword of the year. And the darlings of metadata are
the folks who are doing the Dublin Core.
Metadata is, like, data about data. Example: if the data is a photographic JPEG
of my ass, the metadata would be who the photographer was, the date the picture
was taken, who owns the picture, and maybe some explanation ("Mr. Bad's fine
bootie."). You could conceivably use that metadata for searching for pictures of
my ass -- and they wouldn't have to be named "Mr_Bads_Ass.jpg" or anything.
How you define metadata is a sticky business. The W3 has this RDF thingy that
Netscape thought up, and of course you can add some of this stuff to HTML pages,
too. The Dublin Core is pretty agnostic about the medium used to specify the
metadata -- they're more interested in defining WHAT you say, not in how you say
it.
OK, so, go see the Dublin Core RIGHT NOW. Check it out! And then go add tons of
metadata to your Web site! It's like updating your stuff without really HAVING
TO! Isn't that cool?
