26.11.2012 17:08, James Weinheimer:
.. an interesting question: Has Dublin Core failed? While it
certainly can't be claimed a success, it has been folded into other
initiatives, e.g. OAI and RDFa. Yet it has not been taken up by many
organizations.
Although having been the aim of the project: The hope was that all
webmasters equip their HTML files with DC metadata so as to aid the
search engines in finding more relevant stuff. Mind you, that was before
Google came along and quickly demonstrated to be able to find relevant
stuff with no metadata. ("relevant" being a metaphor meaning something
quite different from "relevant" as any uninitiated end-user would
expect, but that went and always goes down unobjected.) And then,
Google even eschewed metadata altogether because of misuse and
abuse by SEOs.
It is not impossible that the advent of Google was a fatal blow for the
meta movement. But another big factor was that DC was too abstract and
left too much room for interpretation. Instead, they should have
provided a comprehensive tool for metadata generation complete
with forms to fill and rules for filling the forms always ready
to be consulted and easy to follow. That some rules might be useful
was realized only much too late.
But of course, all of that may be beside the point when it comes
to BIBFRAME now...
B.Eversberg
