A Proposal for a Person Schema

This describes a natural Person as a Thing. Therefore, elementId, @id, coreMetaData, and context will always be present in Things.

Property	Expected Type	Description
email	Email	Primary Electronic Mail address.
elementId	String	A unique and persistent identifier for the record within the system's data set.
@id	URL	The full unique link to the item so it's traversable by that property.
coreMetaData	Object	The object representation of the Thing CoreMetaData.
emailAddresses	Array	A collection of Email objects.
socialAddresses	Array	The various Internet locations that help disambiguate a person or organization, such as their FaceBook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter Address.
phoneNumbers	Array	A collection of PhoneNumber. Which foreign key is used will be determined by the object the phone number is in.
languages	Object	A collection of Language.
context	Context	The JSON-LD context for the item in question.
postalAddresses	Array	An array of the object Postal Address.
membership	Object	The object representation of the Thing Membership.
personName	Object	The object representation of the Thing PersonName.
disambiguated	Object	The object representation of the Thing Disambiguated.

Common Elements

Person has multiple common elements, such as postalAddresses, socialAddresses, phoneNumbers, and languages. These have all been approved for quite some time and can be found online at their respective URLs.

Many of the elements within Person are Things or Objects unto themselves and are described below.

email and Email addresses

Email is the primary email address for the person, and emails is a a listing of all other email addresses for the person.

Membership

This is the array of the things (as of now) that a person can belong to within the schema.

Property	Expected Type	Description
affiliations	Array	A collection of Affiliation.
groups	Array	A collection of Group.
initiatives	Array	An array of Initiative.
Organizations	Array	An array of Organization.

Affiliations are very simplistic names, such as CSA, ISACA, etc., basically abbreviations of organization names.

Initiatives has more to do with the various software initiatives a person might be involved in.

Groups and Organizations, however, are different entirely. We cover Groups and Organizations in a different document HERE.

PersonName

PersonName is an object of the Thing PersonName. It is used for names of natural persons, as opposed to a name of an agent, group, organization, etc. The International Federation of Library Associations, as well as a few publishers’ associations, have taken the stance that both name prefixes and suffixes should be standardized. As such, we’ve included that methodology into the Person schema. These two items have their own schemas, which we’ll cover below.

Property	Expected Type	Description
firstName	String	The person's first name.
lastName	String	The person's last name.
middleName	String	A person's middle name.
name	String	The name of the item or record.
elementId	String	A unique and persistent identifier for the record within the system's data set.
freeformName	String	A free-form name for a Person
@id	URL	The full unique link to the item so it's traversable by that property.
coreMetaData	Object	The object representation of the Thing CoreMetaData.
context	Context	The JSON-LD context for the item in question.
nickNames	Array	An array of NickName.
namePrefix	Object	The object representation of the Thing NamePrefix.
nameSuffix	Object	The object representation of the Thing NameSuffix.
akaPersonNames	Array	An array of person names that the person can be alternately know by.

NamePrefix

Name prefix is the object that defines the abbreviated (Dr.) version of a person’s name as opposed to the long version (Doctor).

Property	Expected Type	Description
element id	String	A unique and persistent identifier for the record within the system's data set.
abbreviation	String	A shortened form of a word or phrase.
@id	URL	The full unique link to the item so it's traversable by that property.

NameSuffix

Name prefix is the object that defines the abbreviated (Jr.) version of a person’s name as opposed to the long version (Junior).

Property	Expected Type	Description
name	String	The name of the item or record.
element id	String	A unique and persistent identifier for the record within the system's data set.
abbreviation	String	A shortened form of a word or phrase.
@id	URL	The full unique link to the item so it's traversable by that property.
core meta data	Object	The object representation of the Thing CoreMetaData.
context	Context	The JSON-LD context for the item in question.

Disambiguated

For a discussion about disambiguation, see the online documentation regarding that topic. Each disambiguation record is treated as a Thing as it can change on its own and therefore is required to have coreMetaData associated with it. The key properties here are liveStatus (1 for disambiguated, 0 or null for not), and authorityRecords.

Property	Expected Type	Description
liveStatus	String	A Boolean field of "live" (1::boolean) or "deprecated" (0::boolean).
elementId	String	A unique and persistent identifier for the record within the system's data set.
@id	URL	The full unique link to the item so it's traversable by that property.
statusDate	Datetime	The status date value.
coreMetaData	Object	The object representation of the Thing CoreMetaData.
authorityRecords	Object	An array of Authority Record IDs.
context	Context	The JSON-LD context for the item in question.

Authority Records

Each property in the array of Authority Records contains a Disambiguation Record ID, a pointer to an Authority Source’s record wherein the Person was disambiguated.