2003.Geoparsing and georeferencing of Malesian collection locality data.Telopea 10(1) 43-52.Some form of geographic reference is almost always present on specimen labels, an essential source of information for mapping species distributions and performing biogeographic analyses.The prospect of databasing large herbarium collections is now reality, but the task of manually georeferencing each specimen would be enormous.The fields of biological informatics and geomatics (biogeomatics) provide tools that streamline and automate acquisition, sharing, analysis, and visualisation of biogeographic data.Digitisation of specimens, particularly type specimens is now commonplace, but specimen imaging and optical character recognition (OCR) may also facilitate the data entry process.Natural language processing of digital data significantly reduces the time required to database and georeference a specimen.A prototype for a geoparsing and georeferencing web service has been developed that utilises a digital gazetteer of over 330 000 Malesian place names.This service is demonstrated using Urticaceae collections from Malesia and comparisons are made between automated and manual georeferencing methods.
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Beaman et al. (2003) studied this question.