Building Data for Stacky Covers

We define stacky building data for stacky covers in the spirit of Pardini and give an equivalence of (2,1)-categories between the category of stacky covers and the category of stacky building data. We show that every stacky cover is a flat root stack in the sense of Olsson and Borne--Vistoli and give an intrinsic description of it as a root stack using stacky building data. When the base scheme S is defined over a field, we give a criterion for when a birational building datum comes from a tamely ramified cover for a finite abelian group scheme, generalizing a result of Biswas--Borne.