Under whose wings? A conceptual model for incorporating historical sovereignty information in biodiversity data
提出一个概念模型，将历史主权信息纳入生物多样性数据，以连接历史与现代地理信息，帮助研究者处理地理信息中的主权歧义问题。
Abstract Linking historical and contemporary geographic information in biodiversity data is a useful approach to approximate species population. However, one of the prominent factors that causes ambiguity in geographic information, and hinders the linking process, is the way sovereignty information is used. While historical biodiversity records often use sovereignties as proxies for geographic information about a species, contemporary records do not. This study proposes a conceptual model that incorporates sovereignty information in biodiversity data to foster the linkage between historical and contemporary geographical information. The model comprises two phases: the first phase relates tangible data sources and core components needed to construct historical sovereignty taxonomies; and the second phase is a process model to align historical sovereignty taxonomies with contemporary taxonomies in four phases. The output of the model presents all possible sovereignties that a geographic entity belongs to based on the degree of congruence between the historical and contemporary taxonomies. The contributions of this work are threefold: (1) making all possible ambiguities in historical geographic information explicit in biodiversity data; (2) bringing attention to the modeling choices that domain experts have to make when deciding which sovereignty a place name belongs to; and (3) extending and improving current geo‐referencing practices.