Authoring Formats And Their Extensibility For Application Profiles

Metadata application profiles act as a key element in interoperability of metadata instances. There are various accepted formats to express application profiles. Most of these expression formats such as RDF, OWL, JSON-LD, SHACL, and ShEx are machine-actionable, and formats like spreadsheets or web pages act as human-readable documentation. Due to limited options in the mutual conversion of these expression formats, they are often created independent of each other and thus makes the process of application profile creation and maintenance an expensive process requiring sophisticated skills and time. Proposals for convertible authoring formats to create application profiles have received less acceptance, mainly due to their inability in addressing various use cases and requirements. The authors describe a new authoring format based on YAML and evaluate the scope of extensibility of authoring formats by comparing this with the capabilities of two already available proposals; Simple DSP, Bibframe Editor. The comparison includes an attempt to recreate real-world application profiles with an extensible format. This study argues that the extensible authoring formats are suitable for creating application profiles with custom requirements and different use cases. This would promote the acceptance of application profiles by reducing the associated cost and skill requirements in creation, maintenance, and publishing of application profiles.