In the example currently at http://geodex.org/voc/examples/dataset/full there are roles in the creator element that might also be put as contributor (e.g. student, principle investigator) or contactPoint (contact). The basic problem is the slippery slope that schema.org has launched with hard-typing some roles related to dataset (accountablePerson, author, contributor, copyrightHolder, creator, editor, funder, producer, provider, publisher, sponsor, translator), and allowing soft-typing as well with the Role element.
I suggest that we establish a convention that creator is used instead of author (not new, this is as in the examples), and only those persons/organizations that would be listed as authors in a scientific citation be included as creators. There might be situations where finer granularity definition of creator role is necessary (editor, compiler), but based on citations I've seen, if these are used, then all the authors are in the same role in the citation. Using Role would enable representing this. This would follow practice from Dublin Core and also used in DataCite.
Other related roles would be differentiated as 'contributors', except for those that have 'hard-type' properties already defined (editor, publisher, translator) . Provider should be the distributor point of contact and should be in the distribution information. Sponsor and producer generally aren't used in the science community unless we want to shoe-horn funder into sponsor.
DataCite allows creator and contributor, and as I understand how people are using the creator list is used to construct the citation, and all other acknowledgements go in contributor. DataCite contributor has a controlled vocabulary of roles defined, hard wired into the xml schema, so not easily extensible, but that's good for interoperability. There is also a vocabulary of contributor roles from casrai http://dictionary.casrai.org/Contributor_Roles.
In the example currently at http://geodex.org/voc/examples/dataset/full there are roles in the creator element that might also be put as contributor (e.g. student, principle investigator) or contactPoint (contact). The basic problem is the slippery slope that schema.org has launched with hard-typing some roles related to dataset (accountablePerson, author, contributor, copyrightHolder, creator, editor, funder, producer, provider, publisher, sponsor, translator), and allowing soft-typing as well with the Role element. I suggest that we establish a convention that creator is used instead of author (not new, this is as in the examples), and only those persons/organizations that would be listed as authors in a scientific citation be included as creators. There might be situations where finer granularity definition of creator role is necessary (editor, compiler), but based on citations I've seen, if these are used, then all the authors are in the same role in the citation. Using Role would enable representing this. This would follow practice from Dublin Core and also used in DataCite.
Other related roles would be differentiated as 'contributors', except for those that have 'hard-type' properties already defined (editor, publisher, translator) . Provider should be the distributor point of contact and should be in the distribution information. Sponsor and producer generally aren't used in the science community unless we want to shoe-horn funder into sponsor.
DataCite allows creator and contributor, and as I understand how people are using the creator list is used to construct the citation, and all other acknowledgements go in contributor. DataCite contributor has a controlled vocabulary of roles defined, hard wired into the xml schema, so not easily extensible, but that's good for interoperability. There is also a vocabulary of contributor roles from casrai http://dictionary.casrai.org/Contributor_Roles.
see also https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/384 for some previous discussion on contributors