Dublin Core mapping

In Dublin Core metadata elements are referred to as 'terms'.

facet	Dublin Core term
creator	creator
contributor	contributor
language	language
CreationDate	date
PublicationDate	issued
format	format, except values that contain the term 'Bytes'
discipline
collection
country
title	title or identifier term, or 'untitled'
notes	description
subject	subject
URL	DOI in the identifier term, or DOI in source term
rights	rights
ResourceType	type
SpacialCoverage
TemporalCoverage
DataProvider

Most of the elements as defined by the Dublin Core standard are mapped in a straightforward way. In case of the 'date' element, an assumption was made however. The Dublin Core definition defines the date element a point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource. This definition is much broader than the CreationDate facet can ever interpreted to be. This does not necessarily mean that the interpretation is incorrect. Inspecting the metadata from the respective providers allowed the assumption that the data supplied indeed could be interpreted according to the definition of the 'CreationDate' facet. If the data allows for it, a second term could be added to the mapping: 'created'.

Another element deserving some attention is the Dublin Core 'format' term. While the Dublin Core definition was in general not considered to be contradictory to the definition of the 'format' facet in the catalogue, a specification of a dimension in terms of a certain number of bytes was not interpreted as metadata element relevant to the catalogue. Please note that this not imply that references electronic documents are blocked. A specification of a mime type like for example 'application/pdf' frequently appears in the catalogue.

In case of the ResourceType facet, mapping the Dublin Core 'type' term definition to it, seems correct since the term is defined as 'type of the resource'. So while at first sight a situation similar to the 'date' facet might be expected, both the facet and the term can are equivalent.

Some of the facets, on mapping, do not receive a value. The cause of this is twofold. First, there might simply not be a term defined by the Dublin Core standard that can be mapped onto it, or second, the data harvested does not provide suitable values for the facet.

References: Dublin core DCMI Metadata Terms definition, Metadata semantics definition