Subject: AUTHOR Keyword

From: arots at xebec.gsfc.nasa.gov (Arnold Rots)
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 93 15:34:17 EDT

The use of this keyword seems to have diverged (or may be just evolved),
so I would like to solicit some opinions (consensus would be nice, but
that is undoubtedly too much to hope for) on what to do with it.

I had a vague recollection that AUTHOR was intended to refer to human
authors, but there seems to be an increasing tendency use it for
storing the names of the software SCRIBES that generate the files.

I thought I'd try to get my definitive guidance from the NOST document,
but, unfortunately, that does not seem capable of making up its mind,
either.  The March 8, 1993, version says on p. 18:

>Bibliographic Keywords
>AUTHOR Keyword  The value field shall contain a character string identifying
>who compiled the information in the data associated with the header.  This
>keyword is appropriate when the data originate in a published paper or are
>compiled from many sources.

Purely for bibliographic purposes, thus, and referring to true (human)
authors.
However, on p. 43 it says:

>AUTHOR  gives the name of the author or creator of the table.

A software scribe (i.e., a computer program) could fit the bill.

My question is: is the definition on p.18 outdated and should AUTHOR be
used to identify the scribe that created the file/table?
Or should we preserve AUTHOR's originally intended use and invent another
keyword (I would suggest CREATOR) to identify which version of which
program created the file/table?

  - Arnold Rots