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Title:               DCMI Usage Board Review of Application Profiles
Creator:             Thomas Baker
Identifier:          http://dublincore.org/usage/documents/2003/02/11/profiles/
Latest version:      http://dublincore.org/usage/documents/profiles/
Date modified:       2003-02-11
Description:         This document defines the term "Application 
                     Profile" in the context of the Dublin Core
                     Metadata Initiative.  Criteria for Usage 
                     Board review of Application Profiles and 
                     guidelines for submission are outlined in
                     the DCMI Usage Board Administrative Processes
                     document [PROCESS].

"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].

--  The ideal element set will use URIs to uniquely identify
    its terms within XML namespaces [DCMI-NAMESPACE].  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.


References

[DCMI-NAMESPACE] Andy Powell, Harry Wagner, Stuart Weibel, Tom
Baker, Tod Matola, Eric Miller, Namespace policy for the Dublin
Core Metadata Initiative,
http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-namespace/.

[HEERY] Rachel Heery and Manjula Patel, Application profiles:
mixing and matching metadata schemas, Ariadne 25, September
2000, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/app-profiles/intro.html.

[PROCESS] http://dublincore.org/usage/documents/process/.