The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is an open international organization aiming at developing an interoperable metadata standard. The prerequisite for the standard was the overall acceptance and ability for the description of diverse electronic resources for the web.

DCMI was founded in 1995 during the OCLC/NCSA Metadata Workshop. Since then, the conferences and workshops take place each year. Currently, DCMI collaborates with many institutions from more than 20 countries from various fields such as museums, libraries, knowledge management, informatics, networks, etc. Further development and expansion of the Dublin Core metadata standards are the main focus of the current work.

DCMI collaborates with other standardization organizations such as the W3C, NISO, CEN, and is working on the translation of Dublin Core into 25 other languages.

The DCMI activities are not only developing and maintaining standards, but also developing tools and services for using, designing and managing metadata. DCMI provides a full documentation and support for DCMI standards, related resources, tutorials materials and events.