This year DCMI celebrates the 20th anniversary of the beginning of what has become DCMI; and, for the first time, we are holding the International Conference and Annual Meeting in South America. Twenty years ago, a group of 55 people gathered in Dublin, Ohio—thus the "Dublin" in the name—to address a succinct solution to discovery of document-like resources on the infant Web. This year we gather in São Paulo, Brazil to explore both our progress toward knitting together a ubiquitous and seamless Web of resources and data in the global context of culture, digital humanities, and science, and DCMI's contribution to the evolving metadata ecosystem. As has become our custom, the gathering will bring together devotees of metadata from around the world to explore potential futures for semantic metadata and our various roles in creating those futures.

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, crowdsourcing, 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