Internationalization of resource descriptions is one of the major challenges that we face, and we are not alone in this regard. There are many different parts of the Web infrastructure that are having to cope with different character sets and different languages, and we don't claim to have solved that problem. What we do claim is that there are now important resource description agencies in some 16 countries doing active prototyping with the Dublin Core and see it as a way to make progress on the international front. What is most encouraging at this stage of development is that we have representatives from these different countries who are enthusiastic about the Dublin Core and its future for description of networked resources. So, given the fact that they are actively involved, we have a reasonable expectation that those problems will be dealt with as time goes on.
Internationalization is one of the hardest technical problems on the Web.
Not at all. You can think of this as a metadata architecture for the Web. It's a framework that many different metadata standards can be deployed in. People need to be able to build their metadata sets without knowing anything about other metadata sets, because the cost of cooperation is very high. So the people who are working on electronic commerce, for example, should be able to have a transport syntax that allows them to develop and maintain their own metadata systems for their own purposes.