Evolution of an Application Profile: Advancing Metadata Best Practices through the Dryad Data Repository

Dryad is a general-purpose curated repository for data underlying scholarly publications. Dryad’s metadata framework is supported by a Dublin Core Application Profile (DCAP, hereafter referred to as application profile). This paper examines the evolution of Dryad’s application profile, which has been revised over time, in an operational system, serving day-to-day needs of stakeholders. We model the relationships between data packages and data files over time, from its initial implementation in 2007 to its current practice, version 3.2, and present a crosswalk analysis. Results covering versions 1.0 to 3.0 show an increase in the number of metadata elements used to describe Dryad’s data objects in Dryad. Results also confirm that Version 3.0, which envisioned separate metadata element sets for data package, data files, and publication metadata, was never fully realized due to constraints in Dryad system architecture. Version 3.1 subsequently reduced the number of metadata elements captured by recombining the publication and data package element sets. This paper documents a real world application profile implemented in an operational system, noting practical system and infrastructure constraints. Finally, the analysis presented informs an ongoing effort to update the application profile to support Dryad's diverse and expanding community of stakeholders.