Declaration Role Statement: Definition

Declaration Role Statement

Definition

A Declaration Role Statement is a proposed record that would list, for one Mapping Declaration, which organisation or person held each NIKOLAI declaration role and when. It copies CRediT's pattern of pairing contributors with roles; NIKOLAI does not store such a record today.

NIKOLAI's proposed operational definition

NIKOLAI proposal: a Declaration Role Statement describes the record type that WOULD capture which named person or organisation held which N10 role -- Declaring Representative, CASRAI Declaration Reviewer, Corroborating Evaluator, Declaration Disputant, or Declaration Accuracy Steward -- against one specific Mapping Declaration, together with the date that role was exercised. This does not exist as a unified record today: the actual schema has, at most, two independent meta-field pairs that incidentally cover two of the five roles (submitted_by/submitted_at for Declaring Representative; reviewed_by/reviewed_at for CASRAI Declaration Reviewer), neither of which stores an explicit role label -- the role is only inferable from which pair is populated. The other three roles have no corresponding fields at all. This wording is a NIKOLAI editorial synthesis describing a target shape, not a quotation from any single source, and not (yet) a description of what the system actually stores.

The operational definition is CASRAI's own proposal, not a definition any named organisation has agreed to. See what NIKOLAI is and is not, or browse the AI safety glossary.

Examples

Examples from published documents

CRediT allows one contributor to hold several roles and one role to have several contributors, and requires contributions to be captured in structured, machine-readable XML (ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, section 3.2.1).
The only role-like fields stored today are _submitted_by/_submitted_at and _reviewed_by/_reviewed_at on each declaration; the public feed omits both user ids and shows, of these, only the submitted_at and reviewed_at timestamps next to the declaring organisation's name (NIKOLAI Mapping Declarations plugin v0.1.0, casrai_nikolai_decl_post_to_array()).

Counter-examples

Not to be confused with

A Mapping Declaration is not a Declaration Role Statement: the declaration records what an organisation asserts about a crosswalk row, while the role statement would record who did what in filing, reviewing, corroborating, disputing or maintaining it.

Related terms

Related AI safety terms

Terms defined under this element that are not NIKOLAI elements themselves, each as the cited document uses it. Every term is also listed in the AI safety glossary.

CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy): CRediT, the Contributor Roles Taxonomy, is a set of 14 roles for describing who contributed what to a research output, such as conceptualization or software. It was approved as the standard ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 and is maintained by NISO.; Source: ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, CRediT, Contributor Roles Taxonomy (NISO publication page)
Degree of contribution: Degree of contribution is an optional CRediT qualifier used when several people share one role: each person's part can be marked as lead, equal or supporting, so a contribution statement shows relative weight as well as role.; Source: ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, CRediT, Contributor Roles Taxonomy, section 3.2.2

Source of record

Where this definition comes from

ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 (CRediT, Contributor Roles Taxonomy), 3.2.1 Taxonomy Application, Multiple Roles Possible Per Contributor
“A given contributor may have multiple roles.”
https://groups.niso.org/higherlogic/ws/public/download/26466/ANSI-NISO-Z39.104-2022.pdf
ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 (CRediT, Contributor Roles Taxonomy), 3.2.1 Taxonomy Application, Multiple Contributors Possible Per Role
“A given role may have multiple contributors.”
https://groups.niso.org/higherlogic/ws/public/download/26466/ANSI-NISO-Z39.104-2022.pdf

Divergence

Where sources materially disagree

This is the element that makes the track's own "CRediT-pattern" description literal: CRediT's actual mechanism is not the 14 role labels in isolation but the per-output contribution statement that pairs each named contributor with the role(s) they held, formalised by ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. A Declaration Role Statement is that same pairing structure — named party plus role plus one specific record — applied to a Mapping Declaration instead of a paper's authorship block.

Gap

No such record type exists in the schema. Each declaration stores at most two unlabelled field pairs that incidentally cover two roles (_submitted_by/_submitted_at for the Declaring Representative, _reviewed_by/_reviewed_at for the CASRAI Declaration Reviewer); the other three roles have no fields. The public declarations feed exposes neither user id, only the declaring organisation's name and the two timestamps.