Describing Scholarly Works with Dublin Core: A Functional Approach

This article describes the development of the Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP)—a Dublin Core application profile for describing scholarly texts. This work provides an active illustration of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) “Singapore Framework” for Application Profiles, presented at the DCMI Conference in 2007, by incorporating the various elements of Application Profile building as defined by this framework—functional requirements, domain model, description set profile, usage guidelines, and data format. These elements build on the foundations laid down by the Dublin Core Abstract Model and utilize a preexisting domain model (FR-BR—Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) in order to support the representation of complex data describing multiple entities and their relationships. The challenges of engaging community acceptance and implementation will be covered, along with other related initiatives to support the growing corpus of scholarly resource types, such as data objects, geographic data, multimedia, and images whose structure and metadata requirements introduce the need for new application profiles. Finally, looking to other initiatives, the article will comment on how Dublin Core relates to the broader scholarly information world, where projects like Object Re-use and Exchange are attempting to better equip repositories to exchange resources.