John Wieczorek1, P. Bryan Heidorn2, Robert Guralnick3, Reed Beaman4, Chris Frazier5, Dave Neufeld6, Nelson Rios7 & Paul Flemons8
1 Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Valley Life Sciences Building, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
2 Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 501 East Daniel St. MC-493, Champaign, Illinois 61820, USA
3 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and CU Museum, University of Colorado, Boulder, 80309, USA
4 Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, 170 Whitney Avenue, New Haven, CT 06520-8118, USA
5 Dept. of Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87131, USA
6 CU Museum, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA
7 Museum of Natural History, Tulane University, Bldg. A-3, Wild Boar Rd., Belle Chasse, Louisiana 70037, USA
(8) Australian Museum, 6 College Street, Sydney, NSW 2010, Australia
A major challenge in the effective use of species occurrence information is to represent textual descriptions of spatial information in geospatial data structures (georeferences). The geospatial landscape is rife with pitfalls of uncertainty and ambiguity – georeferencing is not just a simple lookup in a gazetteer. We will explore the challenges of geospatially enabling biodiversity data, discuss solutions to these challenges, and describe the tools under development in the BioGeomancer project to automate these tasks.