Core metadata about images

I am trying to catalogue and manage my collection of images created over 
many years, many scanned from prints or slides.

I wish to record  1) names of people 2) places depicted and 3) keywords. 
I assume the best way to do so is using tags where there is country 
hierarchy, lists of people and provision for keywords.

However Digicam seems to put all this data into one field and the three 
values get combined into one field containing place, keywords and 
people. Is there a way to keep them separate so that I can 
print/process/export etc the three fields separately?

Many thanks

Alan Seal