Handling several publishers for a dataset

[aisaac]

Context:

Following advice I'm posting a question here... This is about using DCAT-AP in the work of a Europeana Network working group on Datasheets for digital cultural heritage. We have defined a template to describe datasets from our domain (https://zenodo.org/records/15828222) and are working on aligning it with DCAT-AP.

Question:

One issue we face is that we can have several publishers for a dataset, which violates the constraint of unicity of dct:publisher in DCAT-AP. How should we handle this?

We could use qualified attribution. There is a MARC relator code (this vocab is mentioned in the DCAT-AP spec) for publisher that we could use in the dcat:hadRole property. This feels like a tricky move, though. And it creates the issue that we'd use different patterns (i.e. simple dct:publisher for when we have only 1 publisher, and qualified attribution when we have several publishers) or always use the more complex pattern.

Would there be some way to use several dct:publisher and claim we are still building a profile of (a future version of) DCAT-AP? I see where the constraint could be coming from, but still it seems quite strong to always forbid to have several publishers.