W3C Publishes Recommendation-Track Draft of Profiles Vocabulary

The Profiles Vocabulary has returned to W3C's Recommendation track as a First Public Working Draft. The Dataset Exchange Working Group announced the publication in a W3C news post on 20 August 2026. PROF is an RDF vocabulary for describing how profiles relate to specifications and to supporting resources such as schemas, validation tools, term lists and guidance.

The publication resumes standards-track work on an existing vocabulary rather than introducing PROF for the first time. W3C published a First Public Working Draft under the name Profiles Ontology on 18 December 2018 and published the Profiles Vocabulary as a Working Group Note on 18 December 2019. The Dataset Exchange Working Group's April 2026 charter listed republication of the Note as a Recommendation-track document among its tentative deliverables. The current draft remains a work in progress and identifies features as being at risk pending implementation evidence, while the group is accepting feedback through GitHub.

The Drupal connection is specific to projects working with profiled data-catalogue metadata rather than Drupal generally. Drupal.org's DCAT contributed module provides base entities for data catalogues, can expose machine-readable DCAT output, and is designed as a base for profile extensions including DCAT-AP and DCAT-BE. The W3C draft uses DCAT-AP and a DCAT-AP profile hierarchy as examples of PROF, giving those Drupal use cases a standards-level connection to the vocabulary. Drupal.org currently lists no supported stable release for the module's 2.x line; 2.0.0-alpha4, released 19 June 2026, supports Drupal 10 and 11. The W3C draft does not describe a Drupal-specific integration or require a change to Drupal.