Resources

DRAFT

MIDS Tools

MIDS Glossary

Bare Record

The association between an identifier of a physical specimen and its initial digital representation, allowing for subsequent unambiguous attachment of all other information (cf. basic record, regular record and extended record).

Basic Record

A limited set of information about the specimen; for example, physical specimen identifier and barcode details, and details of the collection it belongs to (cf. bare record, regular record and extended record).

Collection

Within the context of MIDS, a collection is an accumulated group of objects with a focal characteristic that is assembled and maintained by an individual or organization over time. A collection comprises multiple items that are conceptually or physically arranged together for a specific purpose and audience, according to a collection plan.

Sources: Lightweight Information Describing Objects (LIDO) http://terminology.lido-schema.org/lido01053

(Content) Data

Data relating directly to describing physical specimens, such as images of those specimens, information from specimen labels (scientific name, location where collected, date collected, collector name, etc.), links to third-party semantic resources, or measurements and other analyses of specimens.

Digital Specimen

A digital representation on the Internet (digital twin) corresponding to a physical specimen in a natural science collection.

Digitisation

The process of converting analog information about physical specimens (e.g. in natural science collections) to digital form, which therefore includes electronic text, images and other representations; and making that publicly available.

Extended Record

A comprehensive set of elements describing the specimen; for example: all label data, annotations and identification history (cf. bare record, basic record and regular record).

Information Element

A designation for a specific piece of information about the specimen which has a definition and is mapped to relevant schemas to determine whether a dataset satisfies each information element within each MIDS level.

Informative

Providing background or additional information.

Intermediate Record

An intermediary level of information including data that have been agreed over time as essential for most scientific purposes.

Levels of Digitisation

A simple categorisation of the type and depth of digitisation achieved by different approaches to digitisation.

Natural Science Collection

A collection comprised of objects that occur naturally (in contrast to an anthropogenic origin), such as preserved plants and animals, fossils, rocks and minerals, gems, etc. curated and maintained by an institution such as a museum or a university.

Normative

Those aspects of a standard that shall be implemented in order for a particular system to be compliant to the standard.

Sources: ISO/IEC 14496-3:2019(en)

Persistent identifier (PID)

A string (functioning as a symbol) that acts as a (globally) unique and long-lasting reference to a thing. The identifier can be persistently resolved to digitally actionable meaningful information about the identified thing.