DCMI Usage Board Review of Application Profiles

"Application Profile" defined

For the purposes of DCMI Usage Board review, an Application Profile (AP) is a declaration of which metadata terms an organization, information resource, application, or user community uses in its metadata. Moreover:

• By definition, an AP cannot "declare" new metadata terms and definitions; it only "reuses" terms from existing element sets [HEERY]¹.

• The ideal element set will use URIs to uniquely identify its terms within XML namespaces [DCMI-NAMESPACE]². As of 2002, however, this cannot be required.

• By definition, any new term coined for use in an AP must first be declared in a form citable in the AP.

• An AP may also provide additional documentation on how the terms used are constrained, encoded, or interpreted for particular purposes.

As of 2002, APs are seen primarily as a form of documentation, the purpose of which is to help implementor communities harmonize their metadata practice. It is hoped that in the longer term, machine-processable versions of such APs based on data models such as RDF will provide a basis for automating metadata interoperability functions such as semantic crosswalks and format conversions.

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