Latimer Core: A new data standard for collection descriptions

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. Individual items within those groups are represented through other emerging or current standards (e.g., Darwin Core, ABCD). The LtC classes and properties aim to represent information that describes these groupings in enough detail to inform deeper discovery of the resources contained within them. The standard has been developed under the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) Collection Descriptions (CD) Interest Group, and evolved from the earlier work of the Natural Collection Descriptions (NCD) group. Version 1 of the standard includes 23 classes, each with two or more properties (Fig. 1 and Suppl. material 1). 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. 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, demonstrated in Fig. 2. Guidance and reference examples for different modelling approaches to suit different use cases are provided in the LtC guidance documentation. The LtC standard has significant overlap with existing data standards (Suppl. material 2) that represent, for example, individual objects and occurrences, organisations, people and activities. Where possi