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About this document: This wiki is intended to support the normative definitions by providing further information on the terms and concepts represented in the Latimer Core (LtC) standard, and guidance on how the standard may be used in practice. The wiki content is non-normative and may be modified, improved and extended over time.
What is Latimer Core?
The Latimer Core (LtC) schema, named after Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, is a standard designed to support the representation and discovery of natural science collections by structuring data about the groups of objects that those collections and their subcomponents encompass. The classes and properties (collectively terms) aim to represent information that describes these groupings in enough detail to inform deeper discovery of the resources contained within them.
The LtC standard has significant overlap with existing data standards that represent, for example, individual objects and occurrences (Darwin Core, ABCD, and organisations, people and activities (W3C ORG Ontology, W3C PROV Ontology, Schema.org). Where possible, LtC has either borrowed terms directly from these standards or less formally aligned with them. As far as possible, the terms included in the LtC standard should not preclude their use across domains.
Latimer Core is intended to be sufficiently flexible and scalable to apply to a wide range of collection description use cases, from describing the overall collections holdings of an institution to the contents of a single drawer of material. Various approaches are used to support this flexibility, including the use of generic classes to represent organisations, people, roles and identifiers, and enabling flexible relationships for constructing data models that meet different use cases. The collection description scheme concept is introduced to enable adopters to specify rules in the use of LtC within each specific implementation.
The central concept of the standard is the ObjectGroup class, which represents 'an intentionally grouped set of objects with one or more common characteristics'. Arranged around the ObjectGroup are a set of classes that are commonly used to describe and classify the objects within the ObjectGroup, classes covering aspects of the custodianship, management and tracking of the collections, a generic class (MeasurementOrFact) for storing qualitative or quantitative measures within the standard, and a set of classes that are used to describe the structure and description of the dataset. A summary of the classes within the standard is shown in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1: An overview and informal categorisation of Latimer Core classes for describing the object group’s characteristics (green), collections custody (purple), generic reusable information types (dark blue), metrics (red), and data structure and links (light blue).
How is Latimer Core structured?
Latimer Core needs to be flexible in order to support the wide range of use cases identified for the structuring, and qualitative and quantitative description of collections. There are some rules for which classes may be linked together and a very small number of mandatory elements to enforce a basic level of consistency of use across LtC implementations. Within these constraints, there is considerable scope for using the standard with different modelling paradigms, such as relational, graph and dimensional approaches.
With this flexibility, there are challenges in ensuring that Latimer Core datasets can achieve the required degree of interoperability. It is anticipated that, for different use cases, application profiles will be developed that support more targeted and simplified implementations within the wider LtC scope. For example, these may define:
- the classes and properties from the overall standard are included, which are mandatory, and which may be repeated
- the controlled vocabularies to be used for particular terms
- the relationship model to be used
- the metrics and descriptors to be included using the Measurement Or Fact class
The Collection Description Scheme class, in conjunction with the related Scheme Term and Scheme Measurement Or Fact classes, provide a rudimentary starting place for defining these application profiles. Depending on the serialisation used for the LtC data for a given implementation, more spcific and detailed approaches may also be used to achieve this, such as JSON Schema, XML Schema, RDF Shape Expressions or relational database schemas.
Where and how can Latimer Core be used?
Latimer Core is intended to be a generic data standard that allows LtC datasets to be serialised in a range of formats to suit different implementation use cases. This may might include simple CSV files, exchange and linked data formats such as JSON(-LD), XML and RDF, and relational and non-relational database models. While the majority of reference examples are currently demonstrated in JSON, work will continue on building up a suite of examples and reference implementations using different serialisations.
Who uses Latimer Core?
Initial use cases for LtC were contributed from museum and biodiversity informatics communities. The standard is intended to be broadly useful for:
- data providers and users who need to share and aggregate structured collections information
- data aggregators and collections registries who need to standardise collection- and institution-level data from multiple providers
- collections managers who need to inventory backlog and prioritise collections management and digitisation efforts
- museum staff who need to generate collection metrics and summaries
- communities who need to track and share collection history and provenance
- developers of collections management systems and other digital tools who need to support collection-level data and functionality within their platforms
- Latimer Core standard and model concepts
2.1 Audiences