Public review of the Latimer Core begins

The TDWG Executive Committee is pleased to announce that the Public Review of the Latimer Core (LtC) is now open.  Named after Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, the Latimer Core is a product of the TDWG Interest Group on Collection Descriptions and supports the representation and discovery of natural science collections by structuring data about the groups of objects that those collections and their subcomponents contain. The classes and properties (collectively terms) have been designed to represent information that describes these groupings in enough detail to inform deeper discovery of the resources contained within them.

The Latimer Core draft has been reviewed by independent experts, and the Executive Committee has accepted the recommendation that the draft now proceed to public review. In accordance with the TDWG ‘Process’, the public review period must be open for at least 30 days. Because the period will span holidays for many, the review will remain open until 19 January 2024 (extended from 12 Jan). 

An introduction to the standard with links to all its components can be found on the landing page of the standard’s GitHub repository.  

Please participate in the public review by posting a comment or question on the repository’s discussion board. Users who have trouble using the discussion board or who wish to remain anonymous should email their comments directly to the Review Manager, Ben Norton at michaelnorton.ben@gmail.com, who will post them on behalf of the commenter. If you wish to remain anonymous, please make that explicit in your email. The review manager will remove your name and any other identifying information before posting your comment on the discussion board.  All comments will be public and archived following the public review.  In addition to the discussion board, the review manager will host public forums over Zoom on the last two Thursdays of the review period. The forums will give everyone an opportunity to interact directly with the authors of the Latimer Core standard. Meeting details will be posted on the discussion board announcements page.

The Collection Descriptions Data Standard Task Group will endeavor to resolve all issues received by 19 January 2024, prior to requesting ratification by the Executive Committee.  Issues identified after that date may be deferred and addressed under normal maintenance after the standard has been ratified.

Please distribute this link (https://www.tdwg.org/news/2023/latimer-core-public-review/) to anyone you think could or should comment on the proposed Latimer Core standard.

The TDWG Executive Committee congratulates all the members of the Collections Descriptions Data Standard Task Group who contributed to the development of this standard.  The Committee also thanks the review manager, Ben Norton, and the expert reviewers, Robert Sanderson of the Yale Peabody Museum, and Ian Engelbrecht of Natural Science Collections Facility, South Africa.  Ben deserves special thanks for his extraordinary efforts in managing the review of this very large and important proposed standard.

For the TDWG Executive Committee,

Stan Blum
Administrator, TDWG Secretariat