Standards Document: Application Profile — Gateway to 21st Century Skills

Standards Document Application Profile

This document is an application profile (AP) that clarifies the use of the properties in the description of Achievement Standards Network (ASN) standards document.

Title:	Achievement Standards Network Application Profile: Standards Document
Creator:	GEM Exchange
Contributors:	Bruce Fulton, JES & Co. Ryan Laundry, GEM Exchange Stuart A. Sutton, GEM Exchange
Date Issued:	8/12/2005
Date Modified:	11/12/2006
Status of Document:	Working Draft: ASN Working Drafts are considered "unstable" and subject to revision until declared otherwise
Description of Document:	This document is an application profile (AP) that clarifies the use of the properties in the description of Achievement Standards Network (ASN) standards document. This AP has been formatted in conformance with the Dublin Core Application Profile Guidelines produced by the CEN MMI-DC Workshop.
RDF Declaration of Application Profile:	Not yet available.

1. Introduction

The concept of application profiles (see Application Profiles: Mixing and Matching Metadata Schemas) has emerged within the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative as a way to declare which elements from which namespaces are used in a particular application or project. Application profiles are defined as schemas which consist of data elements drawn from one or more namespaces, combined together by implementors, and optimized for a particular local application.

Achievement standards in the ASN are represented by two entities: (1) a document-centric entity called the Standards Document; and (2) the Statement entity that represents an individual semantic unit which, in aggregate, make up the achievement assertions of the Standards Document. This AP describes the uses of properties in the Standards Document entity.

The ASN Standards Document AP has been defined to support the following possible uses:

to serve as an interchange format between various systems using different metadata standards/formats;
to use for harvesting metadata from data sources within and outside of the education and training domain; and
to support creation of standards correlations in education and training domain records for resources within a variety of systems.

The ASN Standards Document AP is a specification that defines the following:

required and permitted properties of an ASN standards document;
permitted schemes and values (e.g. use of a specific controlled vocabulary or encoding scheme);
refinement of property comments to fit the ASN application; and
best practice information regarding the use of the ASN standard document in applications including metadata generation tools, learning management systens and discovery and retrieval tools.

2. Namespaces and Format of entries

The ASN Standards Document AP currently uses (or plans to use) terms from the following namespaces:

Achievement Standards Network (ASN) Terms [http://purl.org/ASN/schema/core/]
DCMI Metadata Terms [http://purl.org/dc/terms/]
GEM Core Terms [http://purl.org/gem/elements/]
GEM Qualified Terms [http://purl.org/gem/qualifiers/]
IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) [To be determined] NOTE: Work continues on the RDF encoding of the IEEE LOM. Once expressed as RDF properties in a declared namespace, LOM elements will be considered for inclusion in the Application Profile.
Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) [http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/]
FOAF (Friend of a Friend) [http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/]

Format of entries:

This Application Profile is presented following the " CEN CWA 14855: Dublin Core Application Profiles Guidelines" produced by the CEN MMI-DC Workshop. On completion of the application profile according to CWA 14855, GEM Exchange intends to declare a Resource Description Framework (RDF) version of the profile according to Guidelines for Machine-processable Representation of Dublin Core Application Profiles, Final CWA, ISSS/WS-MMI-DC/132 (December 2004) at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/cen/ws-mmi-dc/.

Name of Term	A unique token assigned to the term.
Term URI	A Uniform Resource Identifier used to identify the term.
Label	A human-readable label assigned to the term.
Defined By	An identifier of a namespace, pointer to a schema, or bibliographic reference for a document within which the term is defined.
Source Definition	The definition of the term in the namespace in which the term was orginated.
Source Comments	Comments on the term from the namespace in which the term orginated.
ASN Comments	ASN comments about the term including "best practice" information.
Type of Term	The grammatical category of the term (e.g. "Element", "Element Refinement", or "Encoding Scheme").
Refines	The described term semantically refines the referenced term. A refinement makes the meaning of the element narrower or more specific. It will share the meaning of the unrefined element but with a more restricted scope.
Refined By	The described term is semantically refined by the referenced term.
Encoding Scheme For	The described term, an encoding scheme, qualifies the referenced term. Using an encoding scheme will aid in the interpretation of an element value. These schemes include controlled vocabularies and formal notations or parsing rules. A value expressed using an encoding scheme will thus be a token selected from a controlled vocabulary (e.g., a term from a classification system or set of subject headings) or a string formatted in accordance with a formal notation (e.g., "2000-01-01" as the standard expression of a date). If an encoding scheme is not understood by a client or agent, the value may still be useful to a human reader.
Has Encoding Scheme	The described term is qualified by the referenced encoding scheme.
Obligation	Indicates whether the element is required to always or sometimes be present. In this application profile the obligation can be: mandatory (M), mandatory if applicable (MA), strongly recommended (R), conditional (C) with stated conditions, or optional (O). Mandatory ensures that some of the elements are always supported and mandatory if applicable means that this element must be supported if the information is available. An element with a mandatory obligation must have a value. The strongly recommended and the optional elements should be filled with a value if the information is appropriate to the given resource but if not, they may be omitted.
Occurrence	Indicates any limit to the repeatability of the element including unbounded (U) and single (S).

3. Summary Table of Standard Document Properties

Property Label	Context-Specific Definition
Adoption Date	The date the standards document was adopted by the jurisdiction in which it was intended to apply.
Author	A person or organization chiefly responsible for the intellectual content of the standards document.
Change Note	A change note is intended for documenting fine-grained changes to a standards document for the purposes of administration and management.
Date Copyrighted	Date of the copyright of the standards document.
Date Valid	Date (often a range) of validity of a resource.
Description	An account of the content of the standards document.
Editorial Note	Information regarding the analysis of the standards document in preparation for its representation within the ASN.
Education Level	A general statement describing the education or training context. Alternatively, a more specific statement of the location of the audience in terms of its progression through an education or training context. I.e., the grade or grade bands covered by the standards document being described.
Has Child	Identifies child statements of the standards document being described. I.e., identifies the top-level statements of the standards document.
History Note	A history note is a piece of information intended for users of the scheme, documenting significant changes to the meaning/form/state of the standards document since any previous version.
Identifier	An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context. For the ASN standards documents, the value of the «identifier» is always a network-resolvable URI.
Jurisdiction	A legal, quasi-legal, organizational or institutional domain of the entity mandating the use of the achievement standard--e.g., California.
License	A legal document giving official permission to do something with the standards document.
Local Subject	The text string denoting the subject of the document as designated by the promulgating agency.
Publisher	An entity responsible for making the resource available. In the ASN, the promulgating agency of the standards document.
Repository Date	The date the standards document was added to the ASN repository.
Rights	Information about rights held in and over the resource.
Rights Holder	A person or organization owning or managing rights over the standards document.
Status	The publication status of the standards document--e.g., "Draft," "Published," "Superceded."
Subject	A topic of the content of the statement being described as provided by the promulgating agency of the standard.
Title	A name given to the resource.

4. General Language Designation Note

All properties containing text strings (e.g., «description», «changeNote», «editorialNote», «historyNote», etc.) must identify the human language of the text using the xml:lang attribute.

5. ASN Application Profile

«adoptionDate»

Name of Term	adoptionDate
Term URI	http://purl.org/ASN/schema/core/adoptionDate
Label	Adoption Date
Defined By	http://purl.org/ASN/schema/core/
Source Definition	The date the standards document was adopted by the jurisdiction in which it was intended to apply.
Source Comments	The value of the «adoptionDate» property is not to be confused with any local adoption dates by subordinate jurisdictions (e.g., a SIF local adoption date within a zone). Recommended best practice for encoding the date value is defined in a profile of ISO 8601 [W3CDTF] and follows the YYYY-MM-DD format.
ASN Comments	—
Type of Term	element-refinement
Refines	http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/date
Refined By	—
Encoding Scheme For	—
Has Encoding Scheme	http://purl.org/dc/terms/W3CDTF
Obligation	C [http://purl.org/ASN/scheme/Obligation/conditional] Condition: Mandatory upon adoption.
Occurrence	S [http://purl.org/ASN/scheme/maxOccurs/1]

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