No Pain No Gain: Standards mapping in Latimer Core development

Latimer Core (LtC) is a new proposed Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) data standard that supports the representation and discovery of natural science collections by structuring data about the groups of objects that those collections and their subcomponents encompass (Woodburn et al. 2022). It is designed to be applicable to a range of use cases that include high level collection registries, rich textual narratives and semantic networks of collections, as well as more granular, quantitative breakdowns of collections to aid collection discovery and digitisation planning.As a standard that is (in this first version) focused on natural science collections, LtC has significant intersections with existing data standards and models (Fig. 1) that represent individual natural science objects and occurrences and their associated data (e.g., Darwin Core (DwC), Access to Biological Collection Data (ABCD), Conceptual Reference Model of the International Committee on Documentation (CIDOC-CRM)). LtC’s scope also overlaps with standards for more generic concepts like metadata, organisations, people and activities (i.e., Dublin Core, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ORG Ontology and PROV Ontology, Schema.org). LtC represents just an element of this extended network of data standards for the natural sciences and related concepts. Mapping between LtC and intersecting standards is therefore crucial for avoiding duplication of effort in the standard development process, and ensuring that data stored using the different standards are as interoperable as possible in alignment with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. In particular, it is vital to make robust associations between records representing groups of objects in LtC and records (where available) that represent the objects within those groups.During LtC development, efforts were made to identify and align with relevant standards and vocabularies, and adopt existing terms from them where possible. During expert review, a more structured ...