Re: author vs. creator

Um, technically DC doesn't have an "author" element, only "creator."
See the elements list <http://bit.ly/Iji7GV>

On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 3:54 PM, Aaron Bradley <aaranged@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Can anyone tell me what the difference is between "creator" and "author" in schema.org microdata, and under what circumstance I would ever use "creator" rather than "author"?
>
> I've scoured all the schema.org page pages and there's not a single code example that uses "creator" in the code.
>
> Here are the (infuriatingly vague, IMHO) descriptions of the two properties listed under CreativeWork:
>
> author
> The author of this content. Please note that author is special in that HTML 5 provides a special mechanism for indicating authorship via the rel tag. That is equivalent to this and may be used interchangabely [sic].
>
> creator
> The creator/author of this CreativeWork or UserComments. This is the same as the Author property for CreativeWork.
>
> And a related CreativeWork property:
>
> sourceOrganization
> The Organization on whose behalf the creator was working.
>
> No further clarity is to be gained from Google's Recipe example that actually mentions "creator", though not as a property [1].
>
> Under properties recognized:
>
> Property - author
> Description - Creator of the recipe. Can include nested Person information.
>
> data-vocabulary.org markup example:
> By <span itemprop="author">Carol Smith</span>
>
> So - again - under what circumstances would one use "creator" instead of "author"?  And if the answer is "they're fully interchangeable" why is "creator" part of the schema?
>
> By the way, I'm aware of the DublinCore dc:author element, and it's relationship to the RSS "author" element [2] (the former being less restrictive than the latter), but I can't see why the existence of dc:creator would cause the property "creator" to surface in the schema.
>
>
> [1] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173379
>
> [2] http://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile#namespace-elements-dublin-creator
>
> Thanks!
> Aaron Bradley
>
>



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John S. Erickson, Ph.D.
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Received on Monday, 30 April 2012 20:01:17 UTC