Agents, Contributors, etc.

[Gregor Hagedorn]

Hello everybody,

The silence after Lisbon this time unexpectedly does not mean we are
back to sleep. Together with Bob and Kevin I use all available time
in hammering out a new version of the SDD schema incorporating the
discussions from Lisbon and increasing the logic and consistency of
the schema.

Before we publish the entire schema, I would like to raise some
isolated and specific points in the coming days on the email list. I
would also like to point to Bobs WIKI
(http://efgblade.cs.umb.edu/twiki/bin/edit/SDD/) where some
discussions among us are going on.

Topic: Agents
=============

After Lisbon I changed the ContributorsDocumentation/Contributor
structure within Resources to "Agents/Agent".

Kevin writes:
> don't like "agents" much - what about "Contributors" instead of
> "Agents" and change the current "Contributors" to
"OtherContributors".
> After all, authors and editors are subsets of contributors, surely.
> Agents is an awkward term.

I basically agree with Kevin, Agents is not very nice. I used it
simply because ABCD is doing so.

However I don't like Contributors either.

1. I find it confusing being used twice with different meaning.
OtherContributors (i.e. other than Authors or Editors) is not very
nice either.

2. More fundamentally, all resources in SDD are objects and should
have object names. "Contributors" is a _role_ name and therefore not
very appropriate. The list of persons or organizations may be used in
other circumstances, albeit we currently have none in SDD.


Any good other term to denote "Person or Organization" in general,
without naming their role?

Gregor
----------------------------------------------------------
Gregor Hagedorn (G.Hagedorn at bba.de)
Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety
Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA)
Koenigin-Luise-Str. 19          Tel: +49-30-8304-2220
14195 Berlin, Germany           Fax: +49-30-8304-2203

Often wrong but never in doubt!