The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is an organisation dedicated to promoting the widespread adoption of interoperable metadata standards and developing specialised metadata vocabularies.

The initiative began in 1995 with a workshop in Dublin, Ohio, that brought together librarians, digital library researchers, content providers, and text markup experts to improve discovery standards for information resources. The original Dublin Core emerged as a small set of descriptive elements that quickly drew global interest from a wide variety of information providers.