[uf-discuss] haudio contributor

[Manu Sporny]

Alf Eaton wrote:
> I was looking at using haudio today, but stumbled on the 'contributor'
> field: is there a reason it's 'contributor' rather than 'creator', even
> for the main creator (artist, in music) of the piece of audio?

We decided to not use "creator" because it would not be the proper
semantic word for say, a publisher, or a composer. Most of the examples
that we came across listed the publisher as well as the band that
created the musical piece (CD). However, calling the publisher a
"creator" would not be semantically correct.

Dublin core makes this differentiation. There is a dc:creator field,
which is a narrower concept from dc:contributor. Microformats try to use
the most common subset of information among all examples. Some had
"artist", some had "publisher", some had "label", others had "band" -
these are all contributors.

hAudio allows for listing multiple contributors.

If only one contributor is listed, it is assumed that he/she/it is also
the creator of the hAudio. If multiple contributors are listed, it is
assumed that the first contributor is the creator, and all subsequent
contributors played supporting roles in the creation of the hAudio.

Thus, it can be said:

Not all contributors are creators.
Not all contributors are artists.

Thus, we should not narrow the "who made it?" behind hAudio down to
those more narrow categories.

> It doesn't seem to be based on established practice, as from the
> overview it looks like existing markup overwhelming uses 'artist'.
> http://microformats.org/wiki/audio-info-brainstorming#artist

If we used artist, we would not have been able to mark up publishers,
composers, audio technicians, etc.

Does that make sense? Does that explanation raise any further questions?

-- manu