RDFa Document Metadata: Authors in PLOS One

Brief follow up to yesterday's post.

Here's the HTML that indicates authorship from an example PLOS One article.

<p xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:aml="http://topazproject.org/aml/" class="authors" xpathlocation="noSelect">
 <span rel="dc:creator"><span property="foaf:name">Harold C. Sox</span></span><sup><a href="#aff1">1</a></sup>, <span rel="dc:creator"><span property="foaf:name">Mark Helfand</span></span><sup><a href="#aff2">2</a></sup><sup><a href="#cor1" class="fnoteref">*</a></sup>, 
 <span rel="dc:creator"><span property="foaf:name">Jeremy Grimshaw</span></span><sup><a href="#aff3">3</a></sup>,
 <span rel="dc:creator"><span property="foaf:name">Kay Dickersin</span></span><sup><a href="#aff4">4</a></sup>, <span class="capture-id">the <i>PLoS Medicine</i> Editors</span>,
 <span rel="dc:creator"><span property="foaf:name">David Tovey</span></span><sup><a href="#aff5">5</a></sup>, <span rel="dc:creator"><span property="foaf:name">J. André Knottnerus</span></span><sup><a href="#aff6">6</a></sup>,
 <span rel="dc:creator"><span property="foaf:name">Peter Tugwell</span></span><sup><a href="#aff7">7</a></sup>
</p>
<p xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:aml="http://topazproject.org/aml/" class="affiliations" xpathlocation="noSelect">
 <a name="aff1" id="aff1"></a><strong>1</strong> Dartmouth Institute, Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, New Hampshire, United States of America,
 <a name="aff2" id="aff2"></a><strong>2</strong> Portland VA Medical Center and Department of Medicine, Oregon Health &amp; Science University, Portland, Oregon, United States of America,
 <a name="aff3" id="aff3"></a><strong>3</strong> Clinical Epidemiology Program, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada,
 <a name="aff4" id="aff4"></a><strong>4</strong> Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America,
 <a name="aff5" id="aff5"></a><strong>5</strong> The Cochrane Library, London, United Kingdom, <a name="aff6" id="aff6"></a>
 <strong>6</strong> Department of General Practice, University of Maastricht, Maastricht, The Netherlands,
 <a name="aff7" id="aff7"></a><strong>7</strong> Departments of Medicine, and Epidemiology and Community Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
</p>

The basic structure is two 'p' elements, one with a 'class="authors"', the second with 'class="affiliations"'. I am trying to avoid using @class to indicate document structure and metadata, so yesterday I adopted the 'bibo:authorList' convention. But it is useful to see another instance of the nested 'rel="dc:creator"'->'property="foaf:*"' pattern. Is that beginning to look like a trend?

The relationship between author and affiliation is a little broken. The reference from each author to his/her affiliation is actually to an 'a' element with no content. An automatic agent might return an empty string as the affiliation unless it had ad hoc code to pull the text as far as the next '<a>' or '</p>' tag. That's not particularly helpful.

It is important to be clear that this HTML is rendered from XML encoded in the National Institutes of Health's Journal Publishing Tag Set Version 2.0. That's my way of acknowledging that the markup delivered to your browser doesn't bear the full weight of being a well-structured archival version.