#summary Metadata information for user profiles.
#labels Phase-Design

*As of April 2, 2007 profile metadata has been branched off into another project - [http://code.google.com/p/xprofile/ XProfile]. Please refer to XProfile project pages for updated information. This page will continue to contain information about profile metadata relevant only to project ESN.*

= Introduction =

A profile metadata model can be subclassed or partially implemented for a user profile. There can be a huge amount of information that can be stored in a profile, but structuring and standardisation is important at this design stage.

= Profile/CV metadata model =

Profile/CV metadata model is essentially an interesting off-spring of the ESN project. The crux of the problem is the non-standard ways of writing a curriculum vitae or a resume. The presentation of the CV is heavily tied with the actual data, which makes it often impossible to port to different presentation styles.

We design a very generic metadata for a CV. In this way, we can make sure that the necessary information for a CV or resume can be structured with an preset connotation for its elements. From that step onwards, presentation of a CV or resume can be easily separated and dynamically generated. In most cases, XSL can be used to transform a XML CV into XHTML, text, LaTeX, and other formats. For more complex transformations, full parsing and processing can be implemented using DOM in a standard programming language. Generating targeted CVs will mean using a different transform to output only the information necessary for the target.

That is where the metadata model comes to use in ESN. We can import partial metadata (i.e., a targeted CV) into ESN through transformations from full XML CVs.

There have been many discussions and work on this concept. The following links give some pointers.
  * http://cactus.rulez.org/projects/cv-xsl/
  * http://purl.org/captsolo/semweb
  * http://www.foaf-project.org/
  * https://gna.org/projects/xmlcv/
  * https://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/instruments/cv/step1.do
  * http://www.xmlcv.com/
  * http://charlieharvey.org.uk/writings.pl?uid=57&cat=handy
  * http://xmlresume.sourceforge.net/ and http://tinyurl.com/3xp3d (ideas?)
  * http://microformats.org/wiki/hresume

Either we can use and extend such ideas, or we can define our own metadata schema.