Many documentation dialects include mechanisms for connecting people and organizations to metadata records. There are two general approaches to these connections. The first involves including the roles of the people in the names of the metadata element's. For example, the NetCDF Attribute Convention for Data Discovery includes fields titled creator_name, creator_email, and creator_url. This approach makes it difficult to standardize because new standard elements must be added in order to add a new role, i.e. processor_name, processor_email, processor_URL. The second approach centers around a generic description of a person or an organization that includes an attribute that gives the role they play with respect to the resource being documented. This approach allows additions by extending the list of roles. See NetCDF, HDF, and ISO Metadata for more details on this approach.
Connecting people to resources is an important role of metadata. In addition, it is critical to describe people's role with respect to the resource.
The DIF dialect differentiates clearly between documentation of people and organizations. People are documented using the Personnel object with roles of DIF AUTHOR, INVESTIGATOR, and TECHNICAL CONTACT:
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<dif:Data_Center> <dif:Data_Center_Name> <dif:Short_Name/> <dif:Long_Name/> </dif:Data_Center_Name> <dif:Data_Center_URL/> <dif:Data_Set_ID/> <dif:Personnel> <dif:Role/> <dif:First_Name/> <dif:Middle_Name/> <dif:Last_Name/> <dif:Email/> <dif:Phone/> <dif:Fax/> <dif:Contact_Address> <dif:Address/> <dif:City/> <dif:Province_or_State/> <dif:Postal_Code/> <dif:Country/> </dif:Contact_Address> </dif:Personnel> </dif:Data_Center>
The ECHO dialect combines people and organizations into the Contact structure:
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Investigator 1339 ORNL DAAC User Services 749 Archive 638 TECHNICAL CONTACT 617 DATA CENTER CONTACT 585 DIF AUTHOR 368 Producer 271 Data Manager 225 GHRC USER SERVICES 181 User Services 176 Data Originator 77 TECHNICAL CONTACT, DIF AUTHOR 54 Archiver 40 DIF AUTHOR, TECHNICAL CONTACT 35 INVESTIGATOR, TECHNICAL CONTACT 2 Distributor 2
<Contact> <Role/> <HoursofService/> <ContactInstructions/> <ContactOrganizationAddress> <StreetAddress/> <City/> <StateProvince/> <PostalCode/> <Country/> </ContactOrganizationAddress> <OrganizationTelephone> <TelephoneNumber/> <TelephoneNumberType/> </OrganizationTelephone> <OrganizationEmail> <ElectronicMailAddress/> </OrganizationEmail> <ContactPersons> <ContactFirstName/> <ContactMiddleName/> <ContactLastName/> <ContactJobPosition/> </ContactPersons> </Contact>
The ECS Collection Metadata include eight roles:
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