The word profile has two distinct meanings:
Engineering
In standardisation, a profile is an agreed upon subset and interpretations of a specification. Many complex specifications have many optional features, such that two conforming implementations may not be interoperable due to choosing different sets of optional features to support. Even when there are no formal optional features in the standard, vendors will often fail to implement (or fail to implement correctly) functionality from the standard which they view as unimportant. In particular, implementations of standards on mobile devices often have significant limitations compared to their traditional desktop implementations, even if these limitations are permitted by the standard which governs both. Also, standards can sometimes be vague or ambiguous, often unintentionally, but sometimes by intention. Profiles can enforce one possible interpretation.
Profiles are useful to users to ensure interoperability, and in procurement.
In some cases, profiles themselves can be standardised. For example, US-GOSIP, UK-GOSIP and the ISO ISP (International Standard Profile) series in the context of OSI networking , and the various mobile profiles adopted by the W3C for web standards.
Computing
In computing, a profile can also refer to configuration settings and other data associated with an individual data. Thus for example, in Microsoft Windows users have profiles associated with them storing settings, files, history, web caches, etc. Likewise, in Netscape-derived products (Netscape 6/7, Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.), users have profiles containing their settings, web browsing history, etc. Many systems support storage of the profiles on a centralised computer in a network, so a user can get their own preferred desktop settings on any computer they log into on the network.