Date: Oct. 27, 2000
Link: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/baker/10baker.html
Source Author or Organization: Thomas Baker, German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD)

This article teaches Dublin Core (DC) by examining it as a language. For this exercise it is defined as 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; and it has a syntax for arranging elements and qualifiers into statements according to a simple pattern. The article then follows a 200 year old tradition of English grammar teaching by focusing on the structure of single statements.

The tutorial concludes by looking at the growing dictionary of Dublin Core vocabulary terms (its registry) and at how statements can be used to build the metadata equivalent of paragraphs and compositions (the application profile). An appendix compares Resource Description Framework (RDF) and DC grammars.