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I'm currently taking Diane Hillmann's "Building Metadata Application Profiles", a 3-day course at the University of New Brunswick Electronic Text Centre's Summer Seminar Series. I'm really enjoying the course, chiefly because it is providing a broad context both for application profiles and for activity within the Dublin Core initiative. That's not to say the content isn't good - it's excellent. Here is a distillation of the discussion up until the end of the second day (tomorrow we present our individual application profiles to the group):

1) Reduce the number of "left-side" attributes and put your effort into adding specificity and granularity to the "right-side" values (left and right sides of the '=' sign, that is). Basically, using standardized (Dublin Core) element names and taking advantage of the flexibility of Dublin Core's various mechanisms for qualifying the elements promotes good "dumbing down" to unqualified Dublin Core.

2) Eveyone thinks "their stuff" is special and they therefore need to invent a new element set. In Diane's experience, it is rare that a particular community cannot find encoding schemes and vocabularies that are publicly available and reusable. Finding application profiles, encoding schemes, and vocabularies can be challenging but there are a number of efforts underway to develop registries to facilitate sharing and reusing this information.

3) Share your application profile so others can benefit from your work. Part of sharing is documenting, which also has significant benefits to your own (or your successors') use of your application profile.

5) Do not develop your application profile to compensate for deficiencies in your application. This is a no-brainer but people tend to include elements taylored to the search and retrieval system they are currently using. Robust metadata that is developed independent of particular applications will be much easier to migrate and to use in different contexts than metadata that is tied to particular software applications.

6) Do not include administrative metadata in your application profile. Application profiles should define how we describe resources, not records. Identifier elements should be used to tie resources to administrative metadata.