In my view, this applications profiles discussion has become much too
technical. From the point of view of a software engineer (using XML
parser or RDF processor), Jane's assertion is correct, that such a
profile basically is "a schema which imports elements from existing
community-defined namespaces or other schemas".
However, there is more to it than that. Pricilla states "an
application profile is a bit more than just mixing and matching
elements from different namespaces. It also includes specifying
conventions and constraints on usage that may not exist in the vanilla
namespace", and then gives examples that pretty much looks like
cataloging rules to me. Appart from extension elements and specialized
qualifiers and encoding schemes, applications profiles may do
significant things
- impose conventions narrowing the semantics of elements or constrain
their values. People do so without using element qualification or
explicit encoding schemes.
- use readable lables and descriptions for elements and vocabularies
which differs from those devised by the DCMI. People do so in order to
adapt the element set for certain purposes or target audiences, or
just for making them suit the cataloging rules their using.
- delete or merge DC elements. For many purposes you don't need 15
elements. Also, people do things like merging Contributor with
Creator. Quite a few implementors have abandoned "Source" in favour of
dcq:isbasedon (which, perhaps unfortunately didn't pass the dc-usage
committee).
Sigge
________________
Sigfrid Lundberg, Ph.D., . [log in to unmask]
Lund University Library, http://www.lub.lu.se/~siglun/
Netlab, PO Box 3, S-221 00 Lund phone +46 (0)46 222 36 83
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