[ckan-discuss] Guidance for use of Author and Maintainer fields

[Rufus Pollock]

On 26 July 2010 23:20, Richard Cyganiak <richard at cyganiak.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm looking for some guidance on the use of the Author and Maintainer fields
> in CKAN.
>
> Often the author of a dataset is not an individual, but a group or
> organisation. Should I enter the name of the organisation in the Author
> field?

Yes, e.g. <http://ckan.net/package/coins-data>

> What if the author is an organisation, but I also know the name and email of
> an individual who is particularly responsible for this dataset?

I think you could do: Person (Organisation) (or if the organisation is
primary with person secondary: Organisation (Person))

For the author email we prepare something generic (though I believe
all emails are obfuscated again spambots)

> Is there some convention for entering the organisation's (or individual's)
> homepage as well?

Not at the moment. Though you could just put a url in that field if
you wanted. Normally this isn't so important since the main package
url serves this purpose. (it is the project/package home page)

> Finally, what's the recommended use of the Maintainer field?

Idea is that this would be where you had a more debian like setup and
the originator of the dataset was the not the person keeping it nicely
tar-gzipped and with metadata on ckan.

BTW: I'm thinking we should explciitly display the CKAN package
admin(s) as 'CKAN Maintainer' on the page (as we do for groups)

Rufus

> Thanks a lot,
> Richard
>
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