title: What does dcterms.date denote?
body: <p>I was reading <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/a/14893974/3422337">James Donnelly's answer</a> to <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4575967/is-there-a-standardized-meta-tag-for-the-date-of-a-website">"Is there a standardized (Meta?) Tag for the Date of a Website?"</a>. At the end he writes:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>I don't believe <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/a/4576005/1317805">Hangy's answer</a> of <code>dc.date</code> (now <code>dcterms.date</code>) would be relevant here as, as far as I'm lead to believe, the date of this is the date associated with the resource. For example, if the resource was a discussion about the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the <code>dcterms.date</code> could be set to 1066. The same could also be said for <code>icas.datetime</code>.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>The definition of <a href="http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#terms-date" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><code>dcterms.date</code></a> is "A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource." I think the question is whether this "event in the lifecycle of the resource" means an event discussed within the resource, or an event pertaining to the resource itself.</p>
  
  <p>Looking around, I found <a href="http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/User_Guide/Publishing_Metadata#dcterms:date" rel="nofollow noreferrer">an example</a> of the use of <code>dcterms:date</code>:</p>
  
  <pre><code>ex:myManuscript dcterms:date "1633"^^dcterms:W3CDTF .
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The use of 1633 in the example leads me to believe Donnelly's interpretation is right (especially since the other examples on the same page use dates in the 2000s).</p>
  
  <p>However, reading <a href="https://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/bibliographic-data-part-2-dublin-cores-dirty-little-secret/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this post</a>, I also discovered that Dublin Core has a <a href="http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/glossary.shtml#dumb" rel="nofollow noreferrer">dumb-down principle</a>. Quoting from the post:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>The solution to the paucity of Dublin Core elements was this thing called “qualified Dublin Core” (although that term doesn’t seem to be used much any more), in which the fifteen core elements are qualified to make them more specific — for example, dateAccepted, dateAvailable and dateCopyrighted are refinements of the core element date. According to the Dublin Core’s own dumb down principle, “a client should be able to ignore any qualifier and use the value as if it were unqualified […] Qualification is therefore supposed only to refine, not extend the semantic scope of an Element.”</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>This leads me to believe that Donnelly's interpretation is incorrect.</p>
  
  <p>So my question is: What is the correct interpretation of Dublin Core's definition of <code>dcterms.date</code>?</p>