Let be a compact Riemann surface (equivalently, a smooth projective curve over ) of genus , let be a group of automorphisms acting on , and let be the genus of the quotient . The natural projection is branched at points in , and the corresponding generators of the monodromy group have orders , , , ; the sequence of integers is called the signature of the group action.
The label for the family of higher genus curves with a group SmallGroup acting on it with signature is given as For example, the genus 3 Hurwitz curve with automorphism group PSLSmallGroup and signature is labeled: There may be several inequivalent actions described by that label, though. We also distinguish the actions by which conjugacy classes in the monodromy generators are from, creating passport labels. For our previous example represent the two distinct actions of PSL as a Hurwitz group on a genus curve up to refined passports.
The suffixes and are ordinals that are assigned by lexicographically ordering the sequence of conjugacy class identifiers associated to a refined passport.
In order to explicitly identify elements of listed in generating vectors for a given refined passport (and elsewhere), we choose a particular permutation representation of as a subgroup of , the symmetric group on elements (this choice depends only on the isomorphism class of and is the same for all with the same group identifier).