University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Geoparsing biodiversity heritage library collections: A preliminary exploration

Stahlman, Gretchen Renee; Sheffield, Carolyn

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/103357

Description

Title
Geoparsing biodiversity heritage library collections: A preliminary exploration
Author(s)
  • Stahlman, Gretchen Renee
  • Sheffield, Carolyn
Issue Date
2019-03-15
Keyword(s)
  • Biodiversity Heritage Library
  • Geoparsing
  • Biodiversity
  • Text mining
  • Data
Abstract
A short pilot study was conducted to provide recommendations on methods and workflows for extracting geographic references from the text of Biodiversity Heritage Library collections and disambiguating these references. An initial survey of the literature was conducted, and a variety of possible techniques and software were subsequently explored for natural language processing, machine learning, document annotation, and map visualization. A test corpus was evaluated, and preliminary findings identify challenges for a full-scale effort towards automated geoparsing, including: varying OCR quality, diversity of the corpus, historical context, and ambiguity of geographic references. The project background, approaches, and preliminary assessment are described here.
Publisher
iSchools
Series/Report Name or Number
iConference 2019 Proceedings
Type of Resource
text
Language
eng
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/103357
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21900/iconf.2019.103357
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2019 Gretchen Renee Stahlman and Carolyn Sheffield

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