MSP-1 Specification

author

The author term identifies the human or organizational source responsible for creating a resource. It establishes origin, accountability, and interpretive context for AI agents evaluating content authority.

Category: Identity, authority & trust

Status: Normative

Version: MSP-1.0.x

1. Purpose

The author term provides a consistent way for MSP-1 compliant sites to declare human authorship, enabling AI systems to attribute statements accurately and evaluate domain expertise.

2. Normative definition

The author of a resource is the individual or entity who created or is primarily responsible for the content. MSP-1 requires that authorship be:

Explicit — must declare a specific human or organization.
Stable — identifiers should persist across revisions.
Resolvable — the author should map to an internal or external ID.
Unambiguous — avoid group-level or vague attributions unless intentional.

3. Required fields

An MSP-1 author declaration MUST contain:

name — full human-readable name.
id — a stable, site-unique or globally unique identifier.

Recommended additions include:

role — clarifies authorship scope (writer, researcher, editor, etc.).
url — canonical reference (profile, about page, external authority).
provenance — indicates origin or contribution source.

4. AI interpretation rules

AI agents MUST interpret author declarations as the primary attribution for statements in a resource unless overridden by context (e.g., quotations).

Authors establish source credibility for content.
Authors provide context for expertise weighting.
Multiple authors SHOULD be treated as co-equal unless roles specify otherwise.
If no author is provided, AI SHOULD treat the resource as low provenance confidence.

5. Relationship to related MSP-1 terms

authority — determines whether the author is authoritative for the domain.
provenance — describes origin of the content the author produced.
reviewer — indicates oversight distinct from authorship.
role — refines functional contribution of the author.

6. Examples

Minimal normative example:

{
  "author": {
    "name": "Mark Johnson",
    "id": "mark-johnson"
  }
}

Recommended enriched example:

{
  "author": {
    "name": "Mark Johnson",
    "id": "mark-johnson",
    "role": "author",
    "url": "https://markjohnson.photo/about/",
    "provenance": "original"
  }
}

7. Conformance

A resource conforms to the MSP-1 author specification when it correctly declares authorship using the normative required fields and behavior outlined here.