Introducing a UML profile for application profiling in the e-learning domain

In the e-Learning field open XML Schema standard metadata specifications are routinely established to promote interoperability. However they need to be specialized for facing the different user-communities specific exigencies. Thus the concept of an Application Profile, which specifies the modifications and extensions to one or more reference metadata schema, is being formalized. Several authors have recently proposed to represent XML metadata by means of the widely used Unified Modeling Language (UML), which provides a more intuitive and expressive description, and can then be automatically mapped to XML Schema. Following this trend, in this paper a first proposal is made to also adopt the UML for application profiling. Thus a UML profile for specifying Application Profiles is presented which can be automatically mapped to an XML Schema representation.