2. Glossary

This is a draft version

• 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).
• data (also known as 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.
• levels of digitisation – a simple categorisation of the type and depth of digitisation achieved by different approaches to digitisation.
• natural science collection – a collection of natural science objects, 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 - requirements to comply with the standard.
• persistent identifier (PID) – a persistent identifier is 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.
• regular record – a set of information describing the specimen; for example, physical specimen identifier, barcode details, taxon name, collection date and place, collector, etc. (cf. bare record, basic record and extended record).