Andrew, John,

The Citation working group clearly has (or maybe that should be had!) a requirement to capture the authors of a journal article, or other published work.

Currently within a Dublin Core record we can capture only the name, with no means of knowing its constituent parts. For discovery purposes it is often best to know the author's family name, and may be better to know who is the first author. The recommendations for encoding bibliographic citiation information in Dublin Core suggest using dc:creator for author name, with no recommendation on formatting, ie it is just free text. They recommend using an OpenURL ContextObject with a bibliographicCitation property, to capture the citation details that cannot be captured in a simple DC record. Thus there is the option to include some more detailed author name (although the recommendations do not explicitly say this). The OpenURL metadata formats can capture separately for the first author, in optional combinations: family name; given name; initials; suffix.

Another requirement when describing scholarly works is to capture the affiliation. This is not necessarily the author's current affiliation - when an author moves employment the affiliation doesn't change. The affiliation of a scholarly work persists as the organisation where the author worked when the paper was written. Thus it is a property of the resource rather than the agent. I guess this makes it outside the scope of the agent requirements. However it is likely to get confused with the agent affiliation mentioned in your requirements. The citation guidelines recommend capturing the affiliation of a scholarly work as dc:contributor (on the premise that the organisation which employs the author has contributed in some way to the work - possibly a stretch of the definition of contributor, but a pragmatic decision to resolve this problem - and I guess 'contributor' is also an agent).

And other requirements not from the Citation WG:

You may be interested in looking at the agent descriptions we've developed for the JISC Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) (http://iesr.ac.uk/). IESR describes collections of resources, technical services that provide access to those collections, and agents who can be owners of collections and/or administrators of services. IESR agents are organisations (well I guess an agent could be a person, eg an owner, but we'd regard them as an organisation of one). Note that the DCMI Collections WG is so far looking at the collections only, NISO Metasearch Initiative considers collections and services but not agents.

Some details we have for agents:

Identifier (dc:identifier): we assign URIs to our agents. I think this is an important requirement. Even if there are no schemes available at present, it doesn't stop the allocation of persistent URIs to an agent. We also may have identifiers according to 'local' schemes, eg Athens institution identifier in the UK (I don't think this is a 'legal' number).

Name: dc:title

Description (dc:description): not needed for identification, possibly useful for discovery, certainly useful for cataloguing and subsequent sharing of information.

Various contact details: email, phone, fax, address, with country (perhaps this corresponds to jurisdiction), postcode (or whatever) separated out. Again for agent description. I'm sure there must be use cases for contact details. IESR has its own terms for these. I guess this corresponds to your 'location'.

More information (see Also): this is not just for identification. At present IESR allows a URI in this field, included as a 'hook' for possible future requirements to add machine readable descriptions, relations between agents (eg a library is part of an institution).

Best wishes,
	Ann

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Ann Apps. IT Specialist (Research & Development), MIMAS,
   The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK 
Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 6039  Fax: +44 (0) 161 275 6040
Email: [log in to unmask] WWW: http://epub.mimas.ac.uk/ann.html
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: DCMI Advisory Board [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Andrew Wilson
> Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 12:42 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [DC-AB] Describing Agents
> 
> Dear WG chairs
> 
> You may know that the Agents WG is actively seeking to develop a way of
> describing agents within the context of DCMES resource descriptions. The
> need/requirement to describe agents arises in many contexts of course, and
> we expect that the work of the Agents WG will be relevant to work underway
> in a number of other DCMI Working Groups, for example Education, Libraries,
> Collection Description, Government.  It may be that the work of the Agents
> WG to date is sufficient to meet the agent description needs of other DCMI
> Activities. However, in order to develop a widely useful approach to agent
> description it will be valuable for the needs of other WGs to be explicitly
> identified.
> 
> If you chair a WG that does have specific agent description needs (doesn't
> need to be one of those listed above) we'd be very pleased to hear what your
> specific needs are, eg. why you need agent descriptions, what
> characteristics of agents you would like described, etc. As a starting point
> you might care to read the current draft of a document setting out one view
> of the functional requirements for describing agents. The document is
> available at: http://dublincore.org/groups/agents/agentFRdraft2-2.html.
> 
> Thank you!!
> 
> John Roberts & Andrew Wilson
> 16 November 2005