embedding dublin core metadata in a webpage

Question

I have already decided the structure of my Dublin Core Application Profile and the syntax and use of the Dublin Core Element Set for my web application.

But I never used before Dublin Core Metadata in general. So, allow me those simple questions.

About the Dublin Core Application Profile, I have to implement it with HTML and embed it on the header of the page?

About the Dublin Core Element Set, I will also use HTML to implement it. I'm going to use it for images. I will create fields in a table in my DB to store the values of the Set, for every image. When the image render to the end-user (via a gallery) should I also embed the values of the Set for this image? Something like

<img src="smiley.gif" alt="Smiley face" height="42" width="42"
<meta name="DC.title" content="blah blah" />
//other 14 elements of the set here....
>

Thanks

Answer 1

yes that's how I would do it. Interestingly, Or not)

If you look at DC's own site,

<img src="http://dcevents.dublincore.org/public/dc-images/dc2013-title.jpg" width="350" title="DC-2013 logo">

they don't seem to bother, or at least don't bother consistently

Answer 2

If you provide Dublin Core metadata in the head of a HTML document, then this metadata applies to the whole document.

If you want to provide metadata only about a certain thing on that page (and this metadata is not applicable for other content on that page), you should not give it in the head.

Instead, you could use RDFa (e.g. RDFa Lite 1.1) to annotate your content. Prefixes for the Dublin Core vocabulary are pre-defined in the RDFa Core Initial Context:

dc http://purl.org/dc/terms/
dcterms http://purl.org/dc/terms/
dc11 http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/

You’d have to use/"mint" URIs for the things you want to describe on the page.