Re: author vs. creator

Thanks for the quick responses all.  Makes sense enough, especially in the context of "sourceOrganization" (thanks Evan).  And Dan, no it's not terrible to have both as properties for relevant types ... with the augmentation of said improved documentation. :)


For my part I would need a compellingly specific reason to use "creator" over "author" - thinking here of both of how parsers and search engines might handle the two differently (and putting my money on the one with the greatest potential visibility), and in interest of aligning its use (when relevant) with use of rel=author in HTML5/Google author markup.

Without digressing too much, this issue of properties conveying the right data but not "sounding right" or "seeming correct" is likely to become more an more of an issue as extensions come to include more and more specific types.  As I noted in a prior email today, it sure doesn't seem right to have a presenter or speaker at an EducationEvent (such a conference or seminar) be referred to as a "performer" - though I could see the argument that this *does* convey the right data without the need for a new but basically equivalent property, whereas "creator" and "author" sometimes actually mean different things.


John and Dan - oops re dc:author, that was typo/brain slip on my part - meant dc:creator.  Indeed, I was trying to point out that the dc:creator element filled a hole opened by the restrictiveness of the RSS author element.

> From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
> To: Martin Hepp <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org>; Aaron Bradley <aaranged@yahoo.com>; Public Vocabs <public-vocabs@w3.org>
> Cc: 
> Sent: Monday, April 30, 2012 1:12:23 PM
> Subject: Re: author vs. creator
> 
> On 30 April 2012 21:58, Martin Hepp <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org> 
> wrote:
>>  If I remember correctly, that comes from the rNews integration, because in 
> some contexts, "author" is too narrow a word for the individual that 
> created the piece of creative work.
> 
> Yup, as others have said, it was part of the rNews integration. We
> should improve the documentation; I don't think it's terrible to have
> both expressions.
> 
> The modern Dublin Core now has 'creator' rather than 'author', I
> believe due to do the 3rd DC workshop
> http://dublincore.org/workshops/dc3/ back in 1996, see report
> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january97/oclc/01weibel.html ... since it
> doesn't feel quite right to talk about the 'author' of an image. The
> label for http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#terms-creator
> used to still include the word 'author', but it doesn't any more.
> 
> In that sense they're not 100% synonyms but I think treating them
> 'interchangabely' [er, thanks, we'll fix the typo] makes sense.
> 
> Dan
> ----- Original Message -----

Received on Monday, 30 April 2012 20:50:40 UTC