The PBCore metadata standard (Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary) was created by the public broadcasting community in the United States of America for use by public broadcasters and related communities. Initial development funding for PBCore was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The PBCore standard is built on the foundation of the Dublin Core (ISO 15836), an international standard for resource discovery, and has been reviewed, though not endorsed, by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Usage Board.
PBCore extends Dublin Core by adding a number of elements specific to audiovisual (AV) assets. These AV assets can be physical analog media items, or digital media objects. PBCore provides a standard for cataloging and describing media objects in three general ways:
- Intellectual Content provides descriptive metadata including Title, Subject, Description, and Genre. The Intellectual Content for the asset contains no metadata concerning the physical or digital representation of the asset.
- Intellectual Property provides metadata concerning the creator, distributor, and publisher of the AV asset, along with rights information about its use.
- Instantiation contains all technical metadata about the physical or digital representation of the AV asset. This can include format, media type, duration, file size, data rate, aspect ratio, frame rate, and many other aspects of the media object. The Instantiation metadata includes the location of the physical or digital media object, which in the case of a streaming media file can be its full URL. In PBCore there can be many Instantiations for the same AV asset, all of which share the same Intellectual Content metadata.
PBCore provides an XSD allowing validation of PBCore XML records. PBCore XML can be used to exchange detailed metadata about media assets, and optionally the media assets themselves, among systems configured for the PBCore standard.