Every year the DCMI community gathers for both its Annual Meeting and its International Conference on Dublin Core & Metadata Applications. The work agenda of the DCMI community is broad and inclusive of all aspects of innovation in metadata design, implementation and best practices. While the work of the Initiative progresses throughout the year, the Annual Meeting & Conference provides the opportunity for DCMI "citizens" as well as students, apprentices, early career professionals in the dark arts of metadata to gather face-to-face to share experiences. In addition, the gathering provides public- and private-sector initiatives beyond DCMI that are doing significant metadata work to come together to compare notes and cast a broader light into their particular metadata work silos. Through such a gathering of the metadata "clans", DCMI advances its "first goal" of promoting metadata interoperability and harmonization.

This year, the Annual Meeting & Conference is being hosted by the « Texas Digital Library » and held in Austin on the beautiful University of Texas campus. Exciting sessions are in planning for both the Annual Meeting and the Conference. In addition, Austin provides delegates the opportunity to sneak away and explore treasures such as the « Harry Ransom Center » on the University of Texas, Austin campus and to venture out into one of the most exciting music scenes The Americas have to offer. Austin is the home of the « Austin City Limits Music Festival », the « South by Southwest » (SXSW), an annual film, music and interactive conference and festival, and the « Old Settler's Music Festival », to name just a few. All this stems from Austin's year-round music scene earning it the reputation as one of the world's centers of music—American style.

Annual Meeting

The DCMI Annual Meeting brings together many of the working groups of DCMI to advance their various goals and work agendas related to advancing innovation in metadata design, implementation and best practices. Descriptions of the groups can be found on the « DCMI Website ». The working groups include DCMI's governing Boards and their Standing Committees, the Communities representing sectoral and cross-disciplinary metadata functions and their various Task Groups advancing specific work. The DCMI community supports shared innovation in metadata design and best practices across a broad range of purposes and business models through an array of specific activities:

• Managing long term curation and development of DCMI « specifications and metadata terms namespaces »;
• Managing ongoing discussion of current DCMI-wide « work themes »;
• Setting up and managing « international and regional events »;
• Curation and open availability of meeting assets including « proceedings, project reports » and meeting minutes;
• Creation and delivery of training resources in metadata best practices including « tutorials, webinars and workshops »; and
• Coordinating the global community of DCMI volunteers.

International Conference

Beyond the conference theme, special session in the form of tutorials, workshops, hackfests, unconference session and papers, reports, and poster submissions are welcome on a wide range of metadata topics, such as:

• Metadata principles, guidelines, and best practices
• Metadata quality (methods, tools, and practices)
• Conceptual models and frameworks (e.g., RDF, DCAM, OAIS)
• Application profiles
• Metadata generation (methods, tools, and practices)
• Metadata interoperability across domains, languages, time, structures, and scales
• Cross-domain metadata uses (e.g., recordkeeping, preservation, curation, institutional repositories, publishing)
• Domain metadata (e.g., for corporations, cultural memory institutions, education, government, and scientific fields)
• Bibliographic standards (e.g., RDA, FRBR, subject headings) as Semantic Web vocabularies
• Accessibility metadata
• Metadata for scientific data, e-Science and grid applications
• Social tagging and user participation in building metadata
• Usage data (paradata/attention metadata)
• Knowledge Organization Systems (e.g., ontologies, taxonomies, authority files, folksonomies, and thesauri) and Simple Knowledge Organization Systems (SKOS)
• Ontology design and development
• Integration of metadata and ontologies
• Search engines and metadata
• Linked data and the Semantic Web (metadata and applications)
• Vocabulary registries and registry services