Profile guidance needs to include practical guidance

[agreiner]

After reading through the current state of the profile guidance doc, it strikes me that it needs to offer more in the way of actual guidance on how to use profiles. I think it should answer questions like
When is it appropriate to create a profile rather than a schema?
What are pitfalls in making these things?
What are best practices that we see from existing ones?

For example, one thing I would like to see in here is a strong warning against using profile negotiation as the only publication method.

[rob-metalinkage]

The actual guidance is going to be inserted issue by issue as we discuss and agree ways of meeting the identified requirements. work so far is setting up the scope and structure.

[kcoyle]

@agreiner @rob-metalinkage As this is a "guidance" document (which means something like "best practices") the document should address the questions brought up by Annette for each requirement - but there is also an overall: "why create a profile" that doesn't come out in the individual requirements but that should be addressed in the document. It seems to me that the very act of defining "what is a profile?" is going to bring up much of this. We did a wiki page on profiles which might give us a beginning.

[kcoyle]

Here are some best practices, from the Data on the Web Best Practices document, that we may be able to incorporate (without the "data" emphasis):
Best Practice 1: Provide metadata
Best Practice 2: Provide descriptive metadata
Best Practice 3: Provide structural metadata
Best Practice 4: Provide data license information
Best Practice 5: Provide data provenance information
Best Practice 7: Provide a version indicator
Best Practice 8: Provide version history
Best Practice 12: Use machine-readable standardized data formats
Best Practice 13: Use locale-neutral data representations
Best Practice 14: Provide data in multiple formats
Best Practice 15: Reuse vocabularies, preferably standardized ones
Best Practice 16: Choose the right formalization level
Best Practice 27: Preserve identifiers
Best Practice 29: Gather feedback from data consumers
Best Practice 30: Make feedback available