Evaluating Metadata Application Profiles Based on Usage Data Nikos Palavitsinis 1,3 , Hannes Ebner 2 , Nikos Manouselis 1 , Salvador Sanchez 3 , Ambjörn Naeve 2 1 Greek Research & Technology Network, Greece [palavitsinis, nikosm]@grnet.gr 2 Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden [hebner, amb]@csc.kth.se 3 University of Alcala de Henares (UAH), Spain {palavitsinis, salvador.sanchez}@uah.es Abstract. Studying the actual usage of metadata elements can give useful indications to the developers of the metadata schemas. The reasons are that during the implementation phase of such schemas, users interaction with the respective systems is limited to the set of metadata that users actually deem as necessary or useful, whereas prior to their implementation, most metadata elements can be considered useful from a theoretical point of view. This paper presents an evaluation of a metadata application profile that was developed for a context-specific application on agricultural learning resources. This evaluation is carried out through the study of usage data derived from a specific application that implements the metadata application profile. Keywords: evaluation, metadata, learning resource, agriculture 1 Introduction Metadata application profiles (APs) may impose some restrictions and modify vocabularies, definitions or elements of an original metadata standard. In this way they tailor the standard to fit the needs of a specific application (Duval et al., 2002). An important issue regarding the usage of metadata APs lies in the evaluation of how well does it accomplish the purpose of its creation in the context of the specific application domain. Related literature indicates so far, that the approaches to the evaluation of metadata APs vary significantly in terms of methods and tools used. For instance, Table 1 presents a sample of studies that focus on the evaluation of metadata APs by the users (either experts or not). These studies do not emphasize the actual use of the metadata, but the users’ view of the metadata elements after familiarizing with the use of a specific metadata AP. Nevertheless, the actual use of such metadata APs can indicate problems that a preliminary evaluation cannot. Related studies that focus on usage data are described in Table 2. As it can be seen from this table, most of these studies made use of large sets of metadata records, while most of the studies involved metadata used for