Profile definition

Looking for a working definition of a profile - here's a starter from
Dublin Core [1]

"A DCAP is a document (or set of documents) that specifies and describes
the metadata used in a particular application. To accomplish this, a
profile:

   - describes what a community wants to accomplish with its application
   (Functional Requirements);
   - characterizes the types of things described by the metadata and their
   relationships (Domain Model);
   - enumerates the metadata terms to be used and the rules for their use
   (Description Set Profile and Usage Guidelines); and
   - defines the machine syntax that will be used to encode the data
   (Syntax Guidelines and Data Formats)."


I think service access is possibly another dimension of profile - and in
fact I'd like to model profiles as n-dimensional, with the ability to label
(soft-type) each of the dimensions an AP chooses to qualify.

So, even though we are not going to define any specific AP, I think we need
to decide if we will define a meta-model for an AP, in terms of attachment
points for each of these aspects, as well as self-reporting identification
of the set of APs a document conforms to.

Any advances on this definition  before I have a go at defining generic Use
Case(s) that covers this scope?

[1] http://dublincore.org/documents/profile-guidelines/#sect-2