Quoting roles in data services

[Markus Demleitner]

Dear Stéphane,

First off, I think DCP is a better IG for that question than
Semantics.  But that's just in case we decide to write something to
improve the state of matters.

On Sun, Feb 02, 2025 at 11:01:21AM +0100, Stéphane Erard via semantics wrote:
> VESPA distinguishes 3 roles, following current practices: Creator, Contributor, Publisher
> But there is an obvious ambiguity with Creator that needs to be addressed.

Actually, things are even more complicated because most data is
associated with a paper, and I expect most authors would like to see
their paper cited (and only then perhaps any data service).  For
*that*, we have the necessary metadata in the Registry (at least in
principle).  The paper's identifier is in Content/source, and if you
give your service (or, rather, data collection) a DOI, people can
reasonably cite it as such.  I will admit that asking people to cite
two things may be a bit immodest -- but who know?

DaCHS produces citation advice from that that is generally linked to
from the resulting VOTables (via a DALI citation INFO), for example
like this: <http://dc.g-vo.org/gedr3mock/q/download/howtocite>

Of course, few people notice any of that.  I think any effort on
improving data citation would at first best be spent on fixing that
(e.g., making clients expose the information in the DALI's citation
INFO
<https://ivoa.net/documents/DALI/20170517/REC-DALI-1.1.html#tth_sEc4.4.3>
more prominently).

Thinking about ways to acknowledge everyone else involved (or how we
can avoid having to ask people for that kind of acknowledgement,
because let's be frank: it's a pain) probably is something that
should be addressed by wider forums as there is nothing very
astronomy-specific in this.

I'd be surprised if there weren't people working on these questions
at the RDA level.  That doesn't mean we couldn't prototype something
in astronomy, of course.

Thanks,

            Markus