First Public Working Drafts: The Profiles Ontology; Content Negotiation by Profile

The Dataset Exchange Working Group has published two First Public Working Drafts today:

• The Profiles Ontology is an RDF vocabulary to describe profiles of (one or more) standards for information resources. It describes the general pattern of narrowing the scope of a specification with additional, but consistent, constraints, and is particularly relevant to data exchange situations where conformance to such profiles is expected and carries additional context. The Profiles Ontology enables profile descriptions to specify the role of resources related to data exchange such as schemas, ontologies, rules about use of controlled vocabularies, validation tools, and guidelines. The ontology may however be used to describe the role of artifacts in any situation where constraints are made on a the usage of more general specifications.
• Content Negotiation by Profile describes how Internet clients may negotiate for content provided by servers according to profiles. This is distinct from negotiating by Media Type or Language: the profile is expected to specify the content of information returned, which may be a subset of the information the responding server has about the requested resource, and may be structured in a specific way to meet interoperability requirements of a community of practice.