Black On Stuff

I just read an article published by Avangate, How to Build the Semantic Web with Dublin Core and then went out to search the web about Dublin Core.

I consider myself to have web development skills, but I never used this standard so far. And none of my friends too. Then, is it really a success on the web as it says on the article, or it might have been if Google wouldn’t have been invented?

The name of the developer group (Dublic Core Metadata Initiative - DCMI) first sounded to me like Dharma Initiative from Lost TV Series. Then one of my friends pointed me that the guys that are behind this standard wear (all of them) glasses. What are the chances? Isn’t it that quite odd ?

Anyway, I have tried to find some websites that are using the DCMI tags in their head section. I had some problems finding them, because there aren’t too many. And probably the ones that have these tags are automatically generated from an WYSIWYG html editor.

Take the top 500 sites published by alexa.com. Found some? Nope. Ok, those websites probably won’t need these tags. Then go to your friends websites. Found one? Nope. But I got a nice Firefox plugin for this (like view source wasn’t enough). Ok, finally I’ve found one: www.concediu.com (concediu = holiday in romanian).

I don’t deny the possible success on close communities, corporate websites, government or public sector websites, and of course, if I were to make some sort of search engine that crawls some internal websites, probably this standard would be a saver. Meanwhile, I don’t think any web developer should think of adding these tags to a public website, because it’s a waste of space. Good to know that there is such a standard, might spare us some time re-inventing the wheel.

Something strange just hit me: the two logos of these “initiatives” look alike :-). Could this be for real?