Updated Apr 27, 2007 by xtremebytes
Labels:	Phase-Design

Profile_Metadata

Metadata information for user profiles.

As of April 2, 2007 profile metadata has been branched off into another project - 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.

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