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What is a profile? #15

@dennisvang

Description

@dennisvang

What type(s) of issue is this?

Ambiguity, Incompleteness

What is the issue?

The word "profile" occurs in two places in the spec v1.2:

section 4.2:

dct:conformsTo [...] This property points to a profile that contains the specification of the FAIR Data Point's metadata schema (in SHACL).

section 6:

Each metadata record SHOULD have a reference to its own profile which, on its turn, MUST point to the metadata schema expressed in SHACL;

(my emphasis)

However, no clear definition of the word "profile" is provided.

I can deduce from the above that it must be something that either "contains" or "points to" a metadata schema in SHACL, but that is already ambiguous.

Is it a DCAT profile ("a named set of constraints based on DCAT"), dublin core application profile ("a document [...] that specifies and describes the metadata used in a particular application"), or a profile in the sense of The Profiles Vocabulary?

The FDP reference implementation apparently uses the The Profiles Vocabulary, as can be seen in the source:

private static final String PROFILE_PREFIX = "http://www.w3.org/ns/dx/prof/";

This makes sense considering that prof:Profile is a subclass of dcterms:Standard.

According to DCAT resource_conforms_to, dcterms:conformsTo has range dcterms:Standard, which can be any number of things:

This property SHOULD be used to indicate the model, schema, ontology, view or profile that the cataloged resource content conforms to.

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