GEOLocate World: An Expanded Tool for Georeferencing Natural History Collections

杜兰大学获得了一项资助，将GEOlocate工具扩展到全球范围，扩展GEOlocate的架构，以包括多语言支持，并开发一种分类足迹验证服务，以加快可视化和校正GEOlocate确定的坐标。自然史收藏传统上是生物分类学和系统学研究的资源。越来越多的标本及其数据被用于生态学、保护和环境生物学的研究。利用博物馆数据进行这类研究的一个主要障碍是，大多数博物馆数据库中的收藏地点没有地理参考（即缺乏经纬度坐标）。在绝大多数情况下，收集地点被记录或数字化为一串文本，描述位置为离城镇或其他地理参考点有一段距离和指南针方向的道路位置。对这些数据进行地理参考（获取地图坐标）的传统方法既繁琐又耗时，通常涉及在硬拷贝或数字地图上查找位置、绘制位置以及手工或借助计算机确定坐标。在之前的支持中，pi已经开发了一个名为GEOLocate的软件工具，该工具使用模式匹配算法将位置文本字符串分解为基本的方向、距离和地理位置组件。该算法使用地名数据库和其他信息源来快速返回相当精确的经纬度坐标。GEOLocate包括可视化、校正和误差估计功能，允许用户更精确地固定位置并将地理坐标返回到数据库。当前版本的GEOLocate是为北美收藏（美国、加拿大和墨西哥）的地理参考而开发的，在该领域非常有效。该工具已分发给140多个用户，并在自然历史收藏界获得广泛接受。该奖项旨在将该工具的覆盖范围扩大到整个世界，并使其多语言服务于国际用户，并允许北美用户参考国际收藏。GEOLocate的世界版本将是一个有价值的工具，用于对世界自然历史收藏中约30亿标本记录进行地理参考，并将有助于促进标本数据在生物多样性信息学新兴领域的使用。因此，GEOLocate World将成为全球生物多样性基础设施设施（GBIF）和拟议的自然环境遗留基础设施网络计算工具包的重要组成部分。分类足迹验证服务将允许专家在地理环境中可视化分类数据。该项目将为两名计算机科学和生物科学的研究生提供跨学科培训。

Tulane University is awarded a grant to expand the GEOlocate tool to world-wide coverage, extending GEOLocate's architecture to include multilingual support, and develop a taxonomic footprint verification service to expedite visualization and correction of GEOLocate-determined coordinates. Natural History collections have traditionally served as a resource for research on the taxonomy and systematics of organisms. Increasingly, specimens and their data are being used in studies of ecology, conservation and environmental biology. A major hurdle in implementing such studies with museum data is that collection localities in most museum databases are not georeferenced (i.e., they lack latitude and longitude coordinates). In the vast majority of instances, the collection locality is recorded or digitized as a string of text describing the location as a position along a road some distance and compass direction from a town or other geographic point of reference. Traditional methods of georeferencing these data (capturing map coordinates) are tedious and time consuming, typically involving finding the locality on either hardcopy or digital maps, plotting the locality, and determining the coordinates by hand or with the aid of the computer. In prior support the PIs have developed a software tool called GEOLocate that uses a patternmatching algorithm to break down the locality text string into basic directional, distance and geographic place components. The algorithm uses place-name databases and other information sources to quickly return fairly accurate latitude and longitude coordinates. GEOLocate includes visualization, correction and error-estimation features that allow users to more precisely fix a position and return geo-coordinates to a database. The current version GEOLocate was developed for georeferencing North American collections (United State, Canada and Mexico) and is highly effective in this area. The tool has been distributed to over 140 users and is gaining wide acceptance in the natural history collection community. This award is about expanding coverage of the tool to the entire world and making it multilingual to serve international users and to allow North American users to georeference international collections. A world version of GEOLocate will be a valuable tool for georeferencing the estimated 3 billion specimen records in the world's natural history collections and would help facilitate uses of specimen data in the emerging field of biodiversity informatics. As such, GEOLocate World would be an important component of computing toolkits in the Global Biodiversity Infrastructure Facility (GBIF) and the proposed Legacy Infrastructure Network for Natural Environments. The taxonomic footprint verification service will allow experts to visualize taxonomic data in a geographic context. This project will provide cross-discipline training for two graduate students from computer sciences and biological sciences.