Semantic Interoperability of Dublin Core Metadata in Digital Repositories

Metadata applications have evolved in time into highly structured “islands of information ” about digital resources, often bearing a strong semantic interpretation. Scarcely however are these semantics being communicated in machine readable and understandable ways. At the same time, the process for transforming the implied metadata knowledge into explicit Semantic Web descriptions can be problematic and is not always evident. In this paper we take upon the well-established Dublin Core metadata standard and suggest a proper Semantic Web OWL ontology, coping with discrepancies and incompatibilities, indicative of such attempts, in novel ways. Moreover, we show the potential and necessity of this approach by demonstrating inferences on the resulting ontology, instantiated with actual Dublin Core metadata, originating from the live DSpace installation of the University of Patras institutional repository