I write a short paper describing how to incorporate Dublin Core Metadata into Len Silverston's Universal Data Model (UDM). Having seen and worked with quite a number of data model implementations, I have often wished there were a general purpose data model one could simply drop into place and begin development against. The UDM is just such as thing. Right out of the gate, it covers 90% of a business' information needs and there are several industry-specific adaptations available. Running a travel website, I elected to obtain the Travel and E-commerce industry add-ons. While I found them both incredibly useful, my recent work with both RSS and Sam Ruby's un-named format has demonstrated to me the importance of rich metadata such as provided by the Dublin Core Element Set. I subsequently undertook a project to inject precisely this sort of metadata into the UDM since it will be a huge help when managing, searching for, and finding content for my websites. The paper includes an entity relationship diagram that illustrates my modifications and explains the mappings of concepts from the database model to the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set. Not all elements were ported, but I tried to highlight which additional elements might be useful for full-blown content management solutions. Download in MS Reader or MS Word format.
Feedback is always welcome, and, in this case, I am vigorously soliciting it.