Using the Audubon Core Controlled Vocabularies for subjectPart and subjectOrientation

Abstract

When the Audubon Core Multimedia Resources Metadata Schema*1 was ratified, it included two terms for describing what was being viewed in an image of an organism: ac:subjectPart, to indicate the morphological component of the organism included in the view, and ac:subjectOrientation, to describe the direction or viewing angle of the subject part relative to the image aquisition device. Although it was recommended that values for those terms come from controlled vocabularies, no such vocabularies had been created by TDWG. In 2019, the Views Controlled Vocabularies Task Group*2 was chartered to develop controlled vocabularies for these two terms. The result was two Simple Knowledge Organization System*3 (SKOS) concept schemes*4, 5, and a mechanism for determining which subjectOrientation values are appropriate for a given subjectPart and which subjectParts are appropriate for various organism groups. In this presentation, we briefly review the vocabulary development process, key features of the vocabularies, and give an overview of how the vocabularies can be used in several example cases.