On 2/19/13 5:33 PM, Thomas Baker wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 04:53:59PM +0100, Antoine Isaac wrote:
>> Thanks for starting this over. However, while I'm eager to put aside complex
>> acronyms/notions to make progress, I'm quite reluctant to jump to "community
>> profile". The notion of "application" is really important, as it provides the
>> requirements that at the end of the day will scope the product. In many
>> cases, I agree that community will provide useful context. But it can also be
>> utterly vague and provide many opportunities for procrastination. Let's not
>> forget we are engineering artifacts that serve concrete application purposes,
>> not a "community" in general.
>
>> Is "application profile" so unpopular? I have the feeling it is more
>> "abstract model" that people fight with...
>
> What we have called "application profiles" over the years cover document styles
> and granularity ranging from simple lists of properties to developer-ready
> specs.  I have heard complaints from people who find "application" to be
> evocative, but unhelpfully vague and ambiguous.  Ultimately, I think people
> approach the notion of application profiles with different requirements and
> expectations -- some closer to those simple documentation of consensus, some
> closer to well-engineered artifacts that serve concrete application purposes.
> Back in 2006, Dan Brickley proposed [1]:
>
>      In the simplest case, a DC Application Profile characterises the shared
>      description interests of some community of interest. This can be achieved
>      using natural language and other human-oriented materials (eg. case
>      studies, online discussion fora, etc).  In addition to human-centric
>      documentation, Application Profiles can often usefully be described with
>      various machine-readable techniques.  The applicability of such techniques
>      will vary depending on the degree of consensus and commonality of interest
>      in the relevant community.
>
> To me, "Application Profile" seems to be stuck in the middle between the two
> extremes.  Maybe that's a good place to be, but maybe it is unhelpful because
> it encourages us to seek a "one-size-fits-all" approach to specifying profiles,
> where it might be more helpful to distinguish, say, Community Profiles
> (human-oriented expressions of community consensus) from, say, Serialization
> Profiles, or even DCAM Description Set Profiles (developer-oriented specs).


Well, in the case of the Europeana Data Model (and others) an AP indeed encompasses (or is materialized via) a range of products: documents, an OWL ontology, and XML schema...

There's also another point: an application profile can be an individual endeavor, not really concerned about consensus -- it's not always needed to make applications, after all.
I may want to create an application profile just for me and still want to benefit from DCMI's guidance (though I probably won't need all guidance for creating documentation needed for exchanging the data) .


>
>> Plus we'd have to re-work all the DCMI documents...
>
> Well that's certainly a valid point! :-)
>
>> By the way, we had stopped the discussions last year at the time I was about
>> to work on actions I had had for a while. Here is a link to the Europeana
>> Data Model, which I regard to be an application profile of DC, OAI-ORE, SKOS
>> and a couple of others:
>> http://pro.europeana.eu/edm-documentations
>
> Hmm - "Not Found.  The requested resource was not found.
> http://pro.europeana.eu/web/guest/edm-documentations"


Sorry. It was:
http://pro.europeana.eu/edm-documentation


>
> But I'm guessing this is the level where we should be focusing right now.
>
>> There are many documents here that we could use to test our various template
>> ideas. Note that most of these are not strictly formalized. And we would have
>> welcome a template and terminology easy to re-use (my colleague Robina
>> Clayphan kept on complaining that we were not doing a very good work with our
>> domain/ranges and cardinality/occurrence notions :-) )
>
> I think we are agreeing that support for "templating profiles" is the goal.


Great!

Antoine