OpenWEMI: A Minimally Constrained Vocabulary for Work, Expression, Manifestation, and Item

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has published a minimally constrainted vocabulary for the concepts of Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item (WEMI) that can support the use of these concepts in metadata describing any type of created resources. These concepts originally were defined for library catalog metadata and did not anticipate uses outside of that application. Employment of the concepts in non-library applications is evidence that the concepts are useful for a wider variety of metadata users, once freed from the constraints necessitated for the library-specific use.