Geoparsing biodiversity heritage library collections: A preliminary exploration

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