Application Profile is a collection of metadata that is tailor-made to meet the needs of a certain audience. Let's take the school sector as an example: one country creates an Application Profile to describe educational learning resources targeted for schools' use. This Application Profile includes information that helps people to find digital learning resources that they need by the help of for example vocabularies for the age of children or the keywords for the subject areas that are used in that country.

Act Local Think Global

But how is an Application Profile created? One usually starts by analysing the needs of the target audience and see what kind of requirements they have. Then one selects the metadata initiative that fits one's own purposes. Roughly, there are two main initiatives; Dublin Core (DC) and Learning Object Metadata (LOM).

DC is used by a wide audience ranging from museums and libraries to the governmental use. There are also special educational usage of DC. In contrary to Dublin Core, LOM is initially created to describe pedagogical material, hence is much more complete and allows more complexity to refine learning resources and Learning Objects in details.

Even if there are two "source schemes" i.e. metadata initiatives, one doesn't necessarily have to choose one or the other. It is acceptable to mix and match the source schemes as long as one is able to maintain interoperability. And, of course, this is where it gets tricky.

In short, there are a few different approaches to creating Application Profile:

One source scheme i.e. to use either DC or LOM: It is recommended that at least some of the elements are made mandatory to retain interoperability, this might result to the use of sub-set of a source scheme.

Mixing and matching: One handpicks carefully the elements from both source scheme to meet the needs of the practitioners' community.

Adding customised elements: It can also happen that one can't find any elements from existing schemes that fit the purpose. In that case one can invent the element. Here it is important to notice that this only is of use for the given community, and usually of little interest for others.

Creating own vocabularies: This is a lesser action of the above, but very efficient. One creates a vocabulary for example of subject areas to be used as a value for certain metadata element.

What ever approach is selected to localise the metadata, it is still important to keep focused on the global level to ensure interoperability with other Application Profile users. After all, usually the interest for using metadata is not only cataloging it in logical way like in the nearly library, but also to allow the re-use and sharing of resources.

Specially in our days when more and more sophisticated Learning Objects are created, it is of a definite interest for producers and consumers to re-use them on a wider and maybe global scale.

CELEBRATE on the European Level

European Schoolnet co-ordinates an initiative that aims at sharing learning resources between different countires in Europe. This is done through a progerage system that allows federated searches in different learning repositories.

Key for sharing learning material and Learning Objects (LOs) is the use and implementation of a common metadata scheme i.e. Application Profile. This CELEBRATE Applicaiton Profile enables an European dimension by its use of a multilingual Thesaurus for keywords that exisits now in 12 languages. Also the controlled vocabularies have been designed to enable the European dimension.

Guidance

Some good guides for creating Application Profiles are found from current documents like British Standards for Interoperability Between Metadata Systems Used for Learning, Education and Training (BS 8419, version draft 1.5) and from an IMS International Conformance Program that is soon to be released.

Application Profiles not only for Learning Resources

Currently the use of Application Profiles in the eLearning field has been mostly for learning resources. But as eLearning systems get more complex, more profiling is needed to ensure the interoperability of the data. For example work is carried out to build an Application Profile for ePortfolio use to ensure that the data collected in one ePortfolio can be transfered to another one. Also School Interoperability Framework (SIF) is currently looking into an Application Profile for school administrational data.

European Schoolnet's Interoperability-team is currently writing a more complete paper in Application Profiles in school sector. The paper will area in the Interoperability-section of Insight within a few following months.

Until then, keep on profiling!

More information about Europortfolio.org
http://www.europortfolio.org

More information about SIF through OASIS-project
http://www.eun.org/goto.cfm?did=21824

British Standard for Interoperability Between Metadata Systems Used for Learning, Education and Training (still draft)
http://www.schmoller.net/documents/BS8419_part_1_draft_v1_1.pdf

CELEBRATE
http://celebrate.eun.org

CELEBRATE APPLICATION PROFILE
http://celebrate.eun.org/docs/CELEB_AP_v1.1_2003-11-17.pdf

CELEBRATE Technical Documents
http://celebrate.eun.org/docs