Re: Expected value for the author property

Hi
Google wants to get from the web document a verifiable entities, so you is you want to provide any author information, you are free to use a set of author's properties like Person and Organization and rel="author" and itemprop="sameAs", which can be putted together in any combination. E.g. something like:

<div itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person>

<span itemprop="url">https://www.google.com/+exampleperson</span>
<link rel="author" href="https://www.freebase.com/m/0_xxxx" />
<span itemprop="sameAs">http://about.me/exampleperson</span>

</div>



greets
Evgeniy



________________________________
 Von: David Deering <david@touchpointdigital.net>
An: public-vocabs@w3.org 
Gesendet: 2:06 Freitag, 21.März 2014
Betreff: Expected value for the author property
 


Maybe this is an oversight on my part that I didn't notice it before this week or maybe this is a recent change, but I noticed that on the schema.org/Review page as well as on other pages, the expected value for the author property is Person or Organization.  For a long time, the author's name was simply declared with text, and the examples that exist on schema.org as well as in Google's rich snippet guidelines all show the value of the author property as text.  So is this a new standard, and when using the author property, is the expected value now a Person or Organization?  And will declaring the author simply with text no longer suffice?

Also interesting is the author property's definition:  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 interchangeably.  If I understand this correctly, it would seem that this is stating that the author could be declared by using the rel=author tag.  But could someone please explain this definition a little more as well as how the author property could/should be declared moving forward, either with or without the rel tag?  Maybe some examples would be nice.  :-)

Thanks in advance.

David