Latimer Core Maintenance Group
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.
Convener
- Sharon Grant - Field Museum, Chicago, IL, USA
- Janeen Jones - Field Museum, Chicago, IL, USA
- Kate Webbink - Field Museum, Chicago, IL, USA
Core members
- Jutta Buschbom - Statistical Genetics, DE
- Elie Saliba - Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, FR
- Ben Norton - Independent, USA
- Maarten Trekels - Meise Botanic Garden, BE
Motivation and scope
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.
Goals, outputs, and outcomes
This interest group is established to meet the requirements in Section 2.1 of the TDWG Vocabulary Maintenance Specification: to maintain the Latimer Core standard.
Strategy and/or Framework
The LtC maintenance group is holding monthly meetings, in which the current open issues on the standard are discussed and solutions to it are proposed.
Becoming Involved
If you are interested in participating in the group, please contact the convener or a core member.
Resources
- https://github.com/tdwg/cd-legacy for the legacy developments that led to the LtC standard
- Abstract for a presentation at the TDWG 2025 conference in Colombia
- Abstractfor a presentation at the TDWG 2022 conference in Bulgaria
- Abstractfor a presentation at the TDWG 2023 conference in Tasmania
History/Context
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).