In 1998, the International Federation of Library Associations introduced a new model for library catalog data, focusing on the bibliographic relationships within metadata. This model, known as the Library Reference Model (LRM), includes four main elements: Work, Expression, Manifestation, and Item (WEMI), each representing different aspects of created resources. To support the broader use of these WEMI concepts, OpenWEMI was developed by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, providing a general vocabulary with minimal constraints. OpenWEMI’s RDF vocabulary includes classes and properties designed to facilitate the creation of context-specific metadata vocabularies, allowing for the flexible integration of WEMI concepts in diverse applications.

The Dublin Core Application Profiles Interest Group wishes to receive comments on the DC Tabular Application Profiles (DC TAP) draft specification. The DC TAP specification aims to facilitate the reuse of metadata terms and concept schemes from existing vocabularies. Initially it is focused on RDF terms, but we hope it will be applicable to some other approaches. It provides a standard tabular format, which is human editable and machine readable, for documenting which terms should be used in a metadata application and any constraints on their use. Work is underway on tools to convert application profiles in DC TAP to other more expressive formats for validating RDF data, such as ShEx and SHACL.

Metadata is widely applied in China within political, cultural, scientific, and educational contexts. Various national and industry metadata standards have been established, promoting data value mining, sharing, and communication. Presenting Chinese experience to an international audience is helpful for the development of metadata-related research and practice.

DC Tabular Application Profiles

Many communities today create application profiles (APs) for their data. Application profiles provide the rules that govern the creation and reuse of metadata instances. Their function is both to explain the metadata but also to potentially constrain the metadata so that correct usage can be determined. A single profile can serve a variety of needs: metadata creation support, metadata validation, metadata exchange, metadata selection, and mapping between metadata from different sources. Application profiles need to be shareable so that data exchange between communities of practice can take place. There is, however, no current standard for the creation of application profiles such that they could be understood outside of the community within which they have been developed.

Note: This piece, posted to a DCMI wiki in 2011, was reformatted and lightly edited for the DCMI blog in 2019.

The notion of an "application profile" was introduced to the Dublin Core™ community by Rachel Heery at the 8th Dublin Core™ workshop of October 2000. The idea distinguished sharply between "namespace schemas" (sets of data elements as defined by their maintainers) and "application profile schemas" (sets of data elements drawn from one or more namespace schemas and optimized for local needs by implementors), introducing the notion of "mixing-and-matching Dublin Core™ elements with elements from related vocabularies.

Note: This short piece, posted to a DCMI wiki in 2011, was reformatted and lightly edited for the DCMI blog in 2019.

The DCMI Abstract Model (DCAM) specifies an abstract syntax for metadata records independent of particular concrete encoding syntaxes. The components of DCAM's abstract syntax map unambiguously to components of the RDF abstract syntax. In addition, DCAM's abstract syntax provides several grouping constructs not present in RDF -- notably "description sets" (mappable in principle to a named graph instantiated as a "metadata record"), "descriptions" (mappable in principle to a sub-graph of RDF triples about a single subject), "DCAM statements" (mappable to a sub-graph composed of an RDF statement plus contextual information about the value of that statement), and "value surrogates" (mappable to the different sets of statements used to describe values directly encoded as literal string values as opposed to values identified by URIs or blank nodes).