Table 1 PAV authoring properties

pav:authoredBy

Indicates an agent that originated or gave existence to the work that is expressed by the digital resource. The author of the content of a resource may be different from the creator of that resource representation (pav:createdBy), although they are often the same.

pav:authoredBy is more specific than its superproperty dct:creator - which might or might not be interpreted to also cover the creation of the representation of the artifact.

The author is usually not a software agent (which would be indicated with pav:createdWith, pav:createdBy or pav:importedBy), unless the software actually authored the content itself; for instance an artificial intelligence algorithm which authored a piece of music or a machine learning algorithm that authored a classification of a tumor sample [17].

pav:authoredOn

Indicates the date this resource was authored by the agents given by pav:authoredBy. Note that pav:authoredOn is different from pav:createdOn, although their values are often the same.

This property is normally used in a functional way, indicating the last time of authoring, although PAV does not formally restrict this.

pav:curatedBy

Specifies an agent specialist responsible for shaping the expression in an appropriate format. Often the primary agent responsible for ensuring the quality of the representation. The curator may be different from the author (pav:authoredBy) and creator of the digital resource (pav:createdBy). The curator may in some cases be a software agent, for instance text mining software which adds hyperlinks for recognized genome names.

pav:curatedOn

Specifies the date this resource was curated. pav:curatedBy gives the agents that performed the curation.

This property is normally used in a functional way, indicating the last curation date, although PAV does not formally restrict this.

pav:contributedBy

Specifies an agent that provided any sort of help in conceiving the work that is expressed by the digital artifact.

Contributions can take many forms, of which PAV define the subproperties pav:authoredBy and pav:curatedBy; however other specific roles could also be specified by pav:contributedBy or custom subproperties, such as illustrating, investigating or managing the underlying data source. Contributions can additionally be expressed in detail using prov:qualifiedAttribution and prov:hadRole.

Note that pav:contributedBy identifies only agents that contributed to the work, knowledge or intellectual property, and not agents that made the digital artifact or representation (pav:createdBy), thus the considerations for software agents is similar to for pav:authoredBy and pav:curatedBy above.

pav:contributedBy is more specific than its superproperty dct:contributor - which might or might not be interpreted to also cover contributions to making the representation of the artifact.

pav:contributedOn

Indicates the date this resource was contributed on. pav:contributedBy specifies the agents that contributed. This term is a superproperty of pav:authoredOn and pav:curatedOn, but can also be used for other kinds of contributions, such as illustrating or investigating.