Schema.org creator vs. author property

Question

It seems like they are the same?

https://schema.org/author

The author of this content or rating. Please note that author is special in that HTML 5 provides a special mechanism for indicating authorship via the rel tag. That is equivalent to this and may be used interchangeably.

https://schema.org/creator

The creator/author of this CreativeWork. This is the same as the Author property for CreativeWork.

I see some uses in the wild on Datasets use author and others creator.

• Are they indeed the same?
• Should one be preferred over the other?
• Are there other "aliases" in Schema.org?
• Is this notion of being the same recorded in a programmatically accessible form somewhere? (maybe in the canonical RDFa?)

Answer 1

RDF

As of version 3.3, these two properties aren’t related/equivalent in the RDF. Here are their definitions (in Turtle RDF):

schema:author a rdf:Property ;
    rdfs:label "author" ;
    schema:domainIncludes schema:CreativeWork,
        schema:Rating ;
    schema:rangeIncludes schema:Organization,
        schema:Person ;
    rdfs:comment "The author of this content or rating. Please note that author is special in that HTML 5 provides a special mechanism for indicating authorship via the rel tag. That is equivalent to this and may be used interchangeably." .

schema:creator a rdf:Property ;
    rdfs:label "creator" ;
    schema:domainIncludes schema:CreativeWork,
        schema:UserComments ;
    schema:rangeIncludes schema:Organization,
        schema:Person ;
    rdfs:comment "The creator/author of this CreativeWork. This is the same as the Author property for CreativeWork." .

As can be seen, they don’t refer to each other on the RDF-level. The sentence ("This is the same as the Author property for CreativeWork.") in the human-readable definition of creator is the only place that says that these two properties are equivalent.

Differences

While both properties can be used for CreativeWork items, only author can be used for Rating items, and only creator can be used for UserComments items.

Which to use?

As UserComments shouldn’t be used anymore, the author property would be the more useful one if you only ever want to use one of the two properties.

However, as the CreativeWork type is not only for works that have, in the natural langauge sense, an author (documents etc.), but also for works that have a creator (e.g., sculptures, for which there is the Sculpture type), authors of the structured data might want to prefer the creator property in these cases.

Anyway, in Microdata and RDFa, it’s easy to use both:

<span itemprop="author creator"></span>

<span property="author creator"></span>

(You can use both in JSON-LD, too, of course, but it’s not that simple.)

So if you care about the RDF, and until Schema.org makes these two properties equivalent on the RDF-level (if ever), you might want go this way if you think that an interested consumer only supports one of these two properties.