I need to identify people and organizations in my metadata

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.

NASA GCMD Directory Interchange Format

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:

<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>

The dialect includes information for one type of organization: the Data Center that distributes the data. The Data Centers are documented using the DataCenter object:

<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>

ECHO

The ECHO dialect combines people and organizations into the Contact structure:

<Contact>
  <Role/>
  <HoursOfService/>
  <Instructions/>
  <OrganizationName/>
  <OrganizationAddresses>
    <Address>
      <StreetAddress/>
      <City/>
      <StateProvince/>
      <PostalCode/>
      <Country/>
    </Address>
  </OrganizationAddresses>
  <OrganizationPhones>
    <Phone>
      <Number/>
      <Type>voice</Type>
    </Phone>
    <Phone>
      <Number/>
      <Type>fax</Type>
    </Phone>
  </OrganizationPhones>
  <OrganizationEmails>
    <Email/>
  </OrganizationEmails>
  <ContactPersons>
    <ContactPerson>
      <FirstName/>
      <MiddleName/>
      <LastName/>
      <JobPosition/>
    </ContactPerson>
  </ContactPersons>
</Contact>

The ECHO Collection Roles:

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

ECS

<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>

Roles

The ECS Collection Metadata include eight roles: