[Application-profiles-ig] Difference between profile and vocabulary

Tue Mar 3 16:16:28 GMT 2020

On Tue, Mar 03, 2020 at 04:52:23PM +0100, Tom Baker wrote: >John asked: If this is so, then what is the essential difference between>a profile and a vocabulary?The notion of Application Profile was introduced to the Dublin Core community in 1999/2000 by Rachel Heery and Manjula Patel [1]. Heery and Patel distinguished "namespace schemas" (a set of elements as defined by some authority) and "application profiles" (combinations of subsets of one or more namespace schemas, tailored for particular implementations). The notion of Application Profile evolved through the 2000s, notably with the Singapore Framework [2], but this basic distinction was retained: -- Vocabularies (or namespaces) define terms -- Profiles use ("reuse") terms defined in vocabularies I still think this is a helpful distinction, and I like the idea of saying clearly whether you are _defining_ a term as opposed to _reusing_ an existing term with some constraints. And I see a danger of confusion if the two are mixed. So by these criteria, I would consider the following list of existing properties to be a bare-minimum profile:http://purl.org/dc/terms/identifierhttp://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name...because it "re-uses" properties defined elsewhere. And I suppose the following would also be an application profile: identifier name ...because it is using properties which, in this case, are not necessarily defined elsewhere. In other words, my impulse is to say that a profile could exist in the absence of a reference to a specific vocabulary (not that this would be good practice, but as a thought experiment...). Tom [1]http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/app-profiles/[2]//www.voudr.com/specifications/dublin-core/singapore-framework/-- Tom Baker <tom at tombaker.org>