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Metadata Watch Report #3

[ contents | section 1 | section 2 | section 4 | section 5 | section 6 ]

Section 3 - The use of application profiles

The concept of application profiles is rather new. What is not new is that many activities and projects have been mixing and matching metadata elements sets, and have added elements to existing sets and modified the semantics of existing elements (in the sense of defining them in the context of specific applications).

A number of examples is mentioned in the domain reports in section 5, for example:

  • the UK’s Resource Discovery Network uses six out of the fifteen Dublin Core elements with recommended data entry guidelines
  • the European Renardus project uses eight Dublin Core elements are used and one project-specific element.
  • the Australian Government Locator Service adds four elements to the 15 Dublin Core elements.
  • various projects (EDNA, Schoolnet and GEM) in the educational sector use the fifteen Dublin Core elements with a number of additional elements. In practice, these projects make different choices to profile the same specification for their communities, although some specific elements appear in more than one.
  • other educational projects build profiles on the basis of the LOM standard.
  • the US Federal Geographic Data Committee, apparently being aware that implementers would need local adaptations, provides guidelines for creating application profiles for the content standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata

It is not surprising that in sectors where standardisation of metadata element sets is not well advanced or where there is little co-ordination between standardisation activities (such as the industry, publishing and audiovisual sectors) the use or even awareness of application profiles is low.

[ contents | section 1 | section 2 | section 4 | section 5 | section 6 ]

Maintained by: UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN)
Last updated: 13 June 2001