GEOLocate World: An Expanded Tool for Georeferencing Natural History Collections

杜兰大学获得了一笔赠款，用于将GEOLocate工具扩展到全球范围，扩展GEOLocate的架构以包括多语言支持，并开发分类足迹验证服务，以加快GEOLocate确定的坐标的可视化和校正。自然历史收藏品传统上作为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。利用博物馆数据实施此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，它们缺少纬度和经度坐标）。在绝大多数情况下，收集地点被记录或数字化为一串文本，该文本将位置描述为沿着道路的位置，该位置与城镇或其他地理参考点相距沿着一定距离和罗盘方向。传统的地理参考这些数据的方法（获取地图坐标）是繁琐和耗时的，通常涉及在硬拷贝或数字地图上找到位置，绘制位置，并手工或借助计算机确定坐标。在先前的支持中，PI开发了一种名为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，快速返回相当准确的纬度和经度坐标。GEOLocate包括可视化、校正和误差估计功能，允许用户更精确地确定位置并将地理坐标返回到数据库。目前版本的GEOLocate是为地理参照北美收藏品（美国、加拿大和墨西哥）而开发的，在这一领域非常有效。该工具已分发给140多个用户，并在自然历史收藏界得到广泛接受。该奖项旨在将该工具的覆盖范围扩大到整个世界，并使其成为多语种，以服务于国际用户，并允许北美用户对国际收藏进行地理参考。GEOLocate的世界版本将成为对世界自然历史收藏中估计30亿个标本记录进行地理参考的宝贵工具，并将有助于促进标本数据在新兴生物多样性信息学领域的使用。因此，GEOLocate World将成为全球生物多样性基础设施基金和拟议的自然环境遗留基础设施网络计算工具包的一个重要组成部分。分类足迹核查服务将使专家能够在地理范围内直观地了解分类数据。该项目将为计算机科学和生物科学的两名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.