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talk · Tuesday 22 September · 16:30–⁠16:45 · SAL C

Once and future Latimer Core: status update and open conversation

Sharon Grant · State of the Collections Description Interest Group. What's Happening and What's Not!

Recording time 7:58:00–8:12:05Open on Vimeo ↗

Summaries and key moments are machine-produced. Check the recording for the speaker’s exact words.

The short versionLatimer Core is being restructured as a data package with unique term IRIs, enabled by TDWG now accepting standards with formal structure.

Overview

What this was about

Sharon Grant updated the room on the Latimer Core maintenance group, which meets monthly and describes intentionally grouped things ('Latimer Core is to groups as Darwin Core is to individual occurrences'). Users asked for structure to implement it, which required identifiers; the group discovered that term IRIs obtained at ratification were duplicated with different meanings because of its generic 'has identifier' structure, conflicting with TDWG's globally scoped IRIs. After the group asked TDWG whether standards could formally include structure, TDWG agreed, following Darwin Core DP and Camtrap DP, so Latimer Core is building an LTC DP structure layer for public review later in the year (after MIDS), with a conceptual/relationship layer still to come.

Why it matters. The change affects how TDWG standards are defined generally and determines whether collection-level data can be implemented in machines like GRSciColl.

Key ideas

In the room

  • The group moved from task group to maintenance group, meets monthly and has 15 open issues; MCZbase and another system are exploring implementation.
  • URIs, IRIs and persistence were explained: persistence requires someone to maintain the string and a resolving service, which costs money.
  • TDWG issues IRIs for vocabularies, documents and terms; Latimer Core found some term IRIs duplicated with different meanings.
  • TDWG agreed to formalise how standards document structure (grouping and repeating terms, IRIs for statistics as in MIDS).
  • LTC DP will define how terms hang together; a new ratification round and public review is planned, after MIDS.
  • A conceptual layer and term relationships remain future work.
  • The standard is named after Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer and the coelacanth Latimeria, deliberately honouring a woman who managed a collection.
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Transcript

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Programme abstract

Once and Future Latimer Core: Status update and open conversation.

Sharon Grant

Latimer Core (LtC) is the TDWG standard intended to support description and exchange of information about collections and their associated organizational, and preservation contexts. Over the past year, the Maintenance Group has focused on improving its conceptual model, refining documentation, and exploring practical serialization and interoperability patterns that help long-term sustainability and implementation across diverse collection-management environments.

This presentation will provide an overview of the current state of LtC, summarize the work undertaken during 2025-2026, and introduce some implementation examples, including draft JSON and RDF/XML exchange formats. Together, these examples aim to illustrate both the flexibility of the LtC conceptual model and the unresolved questions surrounding structure, identifiers, and semantic interoperability.

The presenters will invite discussion of larger questions that extend to other TDWG efforts: How do we make standards understandable and maintainable for people across different domains of expertise? How should TDWG approach controlled vocabularies and governance? How should we model relationships between terms, and structure their identifiers (IRIs)? How do we document dataset creation, generation, or AI-assisted workflows? What happens when our standards depend on concepts borrowed from outside the TDWG ecosystem?

This session embraces the messier reality of standards work: balancing flexibility and structure, interoperability and usability, technical rigor and human comprehension. The goal is to share where LtC stands today, and invite discussion. How can TDWG standards remain useful, maintainable, and adaptable as biodiversity data practices continue to evolve?

Submitted to the conference programme before the talk, so the talk itself may differ.