Does anyone bother with Dublin Core anymore?

Question

As the question states, is there any point adding Dublin Core meta-tags to your HTML head? Or has sitemap.org removed the use for most of this (though it only replaces some of the tags)

I ask this as most sites I visit don't seem to use DC metatags in their source.

I'm interested in whether I need them for a site that will be used mostly for developers, however the discussion can be broader than this category.

To quote Google (from 2002):

"Currently we don't trust metadata because we are afraid of being manipulated"

Answer 1

Dublin Core is still very important in certain industry sectors. Here in the UK, government organisations use DC to provide standardised access to tags.

Answer 2

Semantic web efforts are still sputtering along. I've run across a couple of research efforts to use RDF triples including the Dublin Core... but nothing close to commercialization.

However, as a general organizing principle for the world wild web? Don't bother. My guess is that folksonomies will deal with some metadata management, but that site tagging will need to be handled through ontological deduction of some sort. I get the same feeling around DC and RDF that I get around general-purpose globally open UDDI registries: nice idea, but that's not the way the world works.

It would be kinda interesting to know whether DC tags increase your Google Page Rank (and how reliably): that could be a strong incitament for many!

Answer 3

I would rather say that the time of rich metadata hasn’t come yet. In fact technologies like RFD are just on the way up. Tim Berners-Lee – you know, the guy who invented the web – quite recently spoke at TED about The next Web of open, linked data. So Dublin Core and other metadata formats are anything but out.

Answer 4

I was looking on the web for information about the Dublin Core and if search engines used them and I came across the academic paper "Search Engines and Resource Discovery on the Web: Is Dublin Core an Impact Factor?" by Mehdi Safari:

http://www.webology.ir/2005/v2n2/a13.html

To quote his conclusions section: "it was found that using Dublin Core elements did not improve the retrieval rank of the web pages" and that "Dublin Core metadata, as a well-known metadata schema, is not widely accepted and used by search engine designers and the spiders do not consider its elements while ranking the web pages".

This was back in 2005, but I am assuming this is still true.