DC & Application Profiles (was: BIBFRAME and Open Annotation Discussion)

(Cross-posted to BIBFRAME and Open Annotation lists... may require a 
look at respective list archives.)

The Dublin Core community has been working on a concept of Application 
Profiles (also sometimes called Community Profiles) that would seem to 
fit the BIBFRAME/Open Annotation use case.

An Application Profile (AP) is a way for a particular community to 
define their use of an ontology or a standard in the case where they may 
be using only a portion of the standard, or may be extending it. The AP 
cannot change the underlying standard or model, but it can narrow or 
expand its usage. It should therefore be entirely compatible with the 
underlying model.

The purpose of an AP is 3-fold:
1. It gives a community a view that makes sense for its use cases, and 
is therefore easier for its members to understand
2. It can be used by targeted systems (such as the library ILS's) to 
integrate the aspects of the standard that will be used in the 
community's data, without having to program for the entire standard if 
it isn't needed
3. The AP can be used to enforce constraints that are not part of 
RDF/OWL, or that would have a negative effect on the sharing of data in 
the open. An AP could define cardinality (repeatable, mandatory, etc.), 
and could constrain values (e.g. require controlled authority lists for 
certain statements). These constraints are not fully compatible with the 
open world assumption of the Semantic Web, but are often desired for 
quality control within a community at the points of creation and use.

A simple example of an AP in the library world would be a system 
designed for small libraries that uses only a portion of the RDA data 
elements. Another example would be a special library, like a film 
archive, that selects the elements it needs from RDA but extends them 
for its special needs.

Note that #3 above could be used by the Open Annotation community to 
implement constraints that are in its standard but that cannot be 
defined in RDF/OWL. This includes pretty much everything in that 
standard that uses terms like "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", 
"SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and 
"OPTIONAL". It is precisely these types of constraints that the Dublin 
Core AP work hopes to address.

There is a proposal for an AP structure [1], but as yet not a fully 
formed machine-actionable version. The Dublin Core annual meeting in 
September, 2013 [2], will have working session on this concept [3], and 
we hope that we can get some consensus on how to make this concept into 
a usable, actionable standard. It would be wonderful to have folks there 
from the Open Annotation community to join in this discussion.

[1] http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-dsp/
[2] http://dcevents.dublincore.org/index.php/IntConf/dc-2013
[3] http://dcevents.dublincore.org/IntConf/index/pages/view/APaltOO

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

Received on Friday, 10 May 2013 20:24:08 UTC