3. Relationships with other standards

Many of the data concepts relevant to collection descriptions are similar to those reflected in specimen-level data standards - such as the type of object, geographic origins and taxonomy - or else are generic concepts like people, addresses and identifiers. Consequently, a concerted effort was made to borrow appropriate terms from existing standards rather than defining them anew, which brings the benefit of closer alignment with related standards.

To improve interoperability and reduce redundancy, some LtC properties reference and re-use properties from existing standards. Where the LtC version of a property’s definition or permitted usage differs from the original, it will be narrower in scope. The provenance of any borrowed properties is referenced in the LtC normative documentation. Any definitions which have been modified will note the LtC definition in the ‘Usage’ field and the original in the ‘Definition’ field, for example:

Label	Genus
Definition	The full scientific name of the genus in which the taxon is classified.
Usage	The full scientific name of the genus in which the collection's taxa are classified.
Existing property	dwc:genus
Existing class	dwc:Taxon

Table 1: Example of a property used in LtC that has been borrowed from the dwc:Taxon class

Any terms which aren’t borrowed directly from elsewhere, but are conceptually aligned with terms found in other standards reference this in the LtC term-level 'notes' field.

The full list and provenance of borrowed terms can be found in the LtC normative documentation. A summary is provided in Table 2, including also sources that informed the development of LtC and are the origin of informally derived terms.

Standard name	Namespace	Documentation
Darwin Core (including extensions)	dwc	https://dwc.tdwg.org/terms/
ABCD(EFG)	abcd	https://abcd.tdwg.org/
AIISO	aiiso	https://vocab.org/aiiso/
Dublin Core	dc	https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/dcmi-terms/
PROV (Provenance)	prov	https://www.w3.org/TR/prov-overview
The Organization Ontology	org	http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-org/
FOAF	foaf	http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/
Schema.org	schema	https://schema.org/

Table 2: List of standards from which terms in LtC have been borrowed or derived.

Data Type	Standard
Date	ISO 8601

Table 3: List of data type standards recommended for use with Latimer Core records.