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.

中文翻译：

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在谁的羽翼下？将历史主权信息纳入生物多样性数据的概念模型

将生物多样性数据中的历史和当代地理信息联系起来是估算物种数量的有用方法。然而，造成地理信息模糊性、阻碍互联互通进程的突出因素之一是主权信息的使用方式。虽然历史生物多样性记录经常使用主权作为物种地理信息的代理，但当代记录却没有。本研究提出了一个概念模型，将主权信息纳入生物多样性数据，以促进历史和当代地理信息之间的联系。该模型包括两个阶段：第一阶段涉及有形数据源和构建历史主权分类所需的核心组成部分；第二阶段是分四个阶段将历史主权分类法与当代分类法相结合的过程模型。该模型的输出根据历史分类法和当代分类法之间的一致程度，呈现了地理实体所属的所有可能的主权。这项工作的贡献有三方面：（1）使历史地理信息中所有可能的模糊之处在生物多样性数据中明确化；(2) 关注领域专家在决定地名属于哪个主权国家时必须做出的建模选择；(3) 扩展和改进当前的地理参考实践。