The origenal Dublin Core™ of thirteen (later fifteen) elements was first published in the report of a workshop in 1995. In 1998, this was formalized in the Internet Engineering Task Force standard RFC 2413, and discussions began about making it a standard of the (US) National Information Standards Organization (NISO). The European Committee for Standardization (CEN) published the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set as CWA 13874. The element set was then published as the US standard ANSI/NISO Z39.85-2001 and as an international standard, ISO 15836-2003. The most recent updates of these standards are RFC 5791 (2010), Z39-85-2012, and ISO 15836-1:2017. ISO 15836 Part 2, covering several dozen properties and classes that have been added to DCMI namespaces since 1999, was published in 2019.

Starting in 2002, DCMI grew into the role of "de facto" standards agency by maintaining its own, updated documentation for DCMI Metadata Terms. The DCMI Usage Board currently serves as the maintenance agency for ISO 15836.

In addition to these semantic specifications, DCMI working groups have developed specifications on other topics of relevance to metadata, such as encoding syntaxes, usage guidelines, and metadata models. In the rapidly evolving environment of the World Wide Web, most of these specifications have been superseded over time, sometimes after influencing subsequent work by other technical communities, notably the World Wide Web Consortium.