Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Dublin Core description set profiles
There's some preliminary information available on Dublin Core description set profiles, including a presentation-style PDF by Mikael Nilsson and a more detailed description. From what I'm getting out of it, it's a way for organizations to define their own metadata and formally specify constraints on it. Some of its features are similar to those of XML schemas. As explained in the article:
The DCMI Description Set Profile specification describes an information model and XML expression of a "Description Set Profile" (DSP). The term description set and the associated concepts used in this specification are defined as in the DCMI Abstract model [[WWW]DCAM].
A DSP is a way of describing structural constraints on a description set. It constrains the resources that may be described by descriptions in the description set, the properties that may be used, and the ways a value surrogate may be given.
A DSP can be used for many different purposes, such as:
- as a formal representation of the constraints of a Dublin Core Application Profile
- as configuration for databases
- as configuration for metadata editing tools
- etc.
A DSP does not address the following:
- Human-readable documentation.
- Definition of vocabularies.
- Version control.
A DSP contains the formal syntactic constraints only, and will need to be combined with human-readable information, usage guidelines, version management, etc. in order to be used as an application profile. However, the design of the DSP information model is intended to facilitate the merging of DSP information and external information of the above kinds, for example by tools generating human-readable documentation for a Dublin Core Application Profile.
Labels: metadata
