A Gazetteer for Biodiversity Data as a Linked Open Data Solution

Abstract

Abstract-Biodiversity studies all life forms that we find in nature. The maintenance of biological diversity is important because it is essential to life on Earth. The lack of accurate spatial geographic information in species occurrence data, especially from diversity rich regions (like the Amazon Forest), leads to problems in many conservation activities, such as systematic planning for the protection of endangered species. In this paper, we present a gazetteer (a geographical directory that associate name places to geographic coordinates) for biodiversity data that is available as an Linked Open Data resource (using a GeoSPARQL Endpoint) and show how it can be used to improve inaccurate geographic collection data. We compared the efficiency of our Gazetteer with three openly available resources, Geonames, WikiMapia and Wikipedia, and got a 10% better recall rate than these endpoints. We also used the Gazetteer to correct geographic data from a big record sample (327,000 occurrence records) from SpeciesLink and GBIF (two big open access repositories of biodiversity occurrence data). In this data set, we were able to add geographic coordinates to around 14% of records that did not have them before.

SWI: A Semantic Web Interactive Gazetteer to support Linked Open Data

“…Once the clustering process is done, the module can decide if the new data refer to an existing site (in the triple store) or to a new place. If the data refer to an existing site, their coordinates are improved (by the gazetteer) using the method proposed by Cardoso et al [11]. This method uses the geographic coordinates that appear more frequently in a group as the site's coordinates.…”

“…a large repository about important Brazilian biodiversity records. We chose this repository because it holds important data about Amazonian biodiversity but has a large number of records with inaccurate geographic information [11]. Using SWI, it was possible to find geographic coordinates for around 57% of records from SpeciesLink that did not have them before.…”

Geoparsing biodiversity heritage library collections: A preliminary exploration

“…As an example of a solution to the problem of discrepancies between historical and contemporary maps, Cura, et al [4] extracted information from historical maps of Paris and matched them to current addresses in modern Paris. For biodiversity, Cardoso, et al [3] used several existing online geographic databases to create a new open gazetteer with superior recall for adding coordinates to species occurrence records. These projects highlight applicable methods and difficulties associated with attempting to accurately and automatically extract place names from the BHL corpus, which spans not only centuries, but the entire globe.…”

Uma infraestrutura semântica para integração de dados científicos sobre biodiversidade

“…Atualmente, repositórios de dados sobre biodiversidade na web vem contribuindo para a disseminação de dados sobre as coletas e observações de biodiversidade realizadas ao redor de todo o planeta. No entanto, grande parte destes dados possuem informações geográficas imprecisas ou ausentes (YESSON et al, 2007;CARDOSO et al, 2014;.…”

“…Com a necessidade de melhorar as informações geográficas contidas nos dados sobre biodiversidade, disponíveis em repositórios online (como o GBIF e speciesLink), o grupo de pesquisa do ICMC/USP desenvolveu um Gazetteer com suporte a tecnologias da Web Semântica (CARDOSO et al, 2014;. O Semantic Web Interative Gazetteer, ou SWI Gazetteer, usa tecnologias da Web Semântica e técnicas de Recuperação de Informação Geográfica para associar coordenadas geográficas a nomes de lugares.…”