The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) supports shared innovation in metadata design and best practices across a broad range of purposes and business models.

DCMI does this by:

• 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.

DCMI's principles of operation are:

• Open consensus building: Participation in the DCMI community is open to all interested groups or individuals with expertise or interests in metadata. DCMI de facto standards, specifications and best practice documents reflect consensus arrived at through consultative debate and review. No fees are assessed for use of such information, inasmuch as the value of such materials is enhanced by their wide adoption.

• International scope and participation: DCMI arose in the 1990s from an informal workshop series that attracted participation of a world-wide community. DCMI has been committed from the start to global participation, as exemplified by a wide array of translations, the location of Dublin Core conferences and regional meetings, and the diversity of regional representation among the DCMI Members and in the Oversight Committee and Advisory Board.

• Neutrality of purposes and business models: DCMI is neutral as to the purposes for which DCMI de facto metadata standards and specifications might be used. DCMI encourages the adoption of these standards and specifications in the public and private sectors and in further de jure standardization that does not jeopardize open access.

• Neutrality of technology: DCMI de facto standards are fundamentally concerned with semantics—the meaning of assertions about information resources. The technological infrastructure underpinning the encoding and expression of these semantics is expected to evolve with time. DCMI attempts to maintain independence of agreed-upon semantics, and to facilitate the expression of these semantics in encoding idioms appropriate to the active stakeholders of the initiative.

• Cross disciplinary focus: Since its early days in the mid-1990s, DCMI's founding principle has been the discovery and management of resources through metadata across the boundaries of information silos on the Web and within intranets.