Authorship supports attribution, provenance, and interpretive context. It helps distinguish content creation from review responsibility, organizational authority, and broader provenance history.

The canonical MSP-1 object form requires name and type. A stable id is strongly recommended but is not required to be a URI.

• name — full display name of the author, whether a person or organization.
• type — declares whether the author is a Person or Organization.

Recommended fields include:

• id — stable identifier for the author, such as a site-local ID, profile URL, website URL, ORCID, or other persistent reference.
• role — specific authorship role, such as author, writer, photographer, editor, publisher, researcher, or contributor.

• email — optional contact email for the author.
• verification — optional authorship verification metadata when supported by the active schema.
• @type — JSON-LD compatibility field. The preferred canonical MSP-1 field is type.

• The author should identify the creator or originating responsible party, not every contributor.
• The author should be distinct from a reviewer unless the same person or organization performed both roles.
• The id field should be stable across revisions when possible.
• Author metadata should not be treated as a trust guarantee, ranking signal, or proof of authority by itself.
• If author is missing, attribution specificity may be reduced, but absence of author should not alone invalidate an otherwise interpretable MSP-1 declaration.

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

Organization author:

{
  "author": {
    "name": "MSP-1",
    "type": "Organization",
    "id": "https://msp-1.org/",
    "role": "publisher"
  }
}

JSON-LD compatibility form:

{
  "author": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Example Author"
  }
}

• reviewer identifies review responsibility; author identifies creation or origination.
• provenance describes broader origin, lineage, creation method, and contributor context.
• role clarifies the function or responsibility of the author.
• authority concerns declared decision-making or stewardship context and should not be inferred from authorship alone.
• trust concerns separate confidence or supporting signals and should not be conflated with authorship.

When present, author should be an object with name and type. The type value should be either Person or Organization.

Validators should encourage a stable id, but should not require that identifier to be URI-only unless a specific implementation profile requires URI identifiers. Validators may treat @type as a JSON-LD compatibility alias for type during transition, while continuing to prefer type for canonical MSP-1 output.