2. Glossary

We understand that many of the words used in the descriptions of data standards are interchangeable. For the purposes of documenting the use of the LtC standard in a consistent fashion, we have opted to use the following definitions. This by no means makes any presumptions about their use in any other documentation therefore it should NOT be assumed that anyone else uses the same definitions.

• Attributes: are the values that a property can take. Attributes can be prescribed/controlled for a particular property and can be thought of as lookup lists, or they may be uncontrolled and thought of as free-form strings. For example ‘George’, ‘Rattus’, ‘under the tree by the rock’.
• Class: a logical grouping of properties, typically defining an entity or thing we are talking about. For example: a Person, a group of objects (ObjectGroup class), etc.
• Controlled Vocabulary: a prescribed set of values that a property can have. Controlled vocabularies improve search functionality, consistency, standardization and reuse, as well as form the basis for machine-readability and -actionability.
• Property: is a unitary concept (e.g., genus, givenName) within a class,_ _each representing a specific piece of data about the thing described by the class. In other words it is “What we can say about the thing defined by the class”.
• Repeatability: whether or not certain classes and/or properties can be repeated. For example, a Person can have several Identifiers of different identifierTypes. A collection (i.e. an ObjectGroup) can have several instances of the CollectionStatusHistory class to describe its different states through time.
• Reusability: several classes can be reused, that is, they can be simultaneously attached to different classes to expand the sets of properties of those classes. For example, the Identifier or TemporalCoverage classes can be used in conjunction with many other classes to describe in more detail and with enhanced functionality the identity and temporal scope of different aspects (represented by classes) of a single collection.
• Scheme: is the word we use for the defined structure of the record. The schema should describe shape, structure and rules of composition.
• Term: is a general word for either a class, a property, or an attribute.
• Vocabulary: is another general word for a set of classes, properties and/or attributes.