The current availability of devices capable of associating geographical objects with their positions on Earth only partially solves the problems related to the location of biodiversity data and, in any case, does not concern the data produced up to a recent past.The resolution of a toponym, that is the mapping process from a place name to its "spatial footprint", requires a procedure to convert a textual description of locality into a "formal" representation, expressed through coordinates and an adequate representation of uncertainty. At the heart of this process is the availability of a gazetteer, i.e. a controlled vocabulary of place names and related positions.LifeWatch Italy has undertaken the preparation of a gazetteer with a semantic approach starting from the "Toponyms IGM" information layer made available by the Italian National Geoportal. Using the GeoNames ontology, the toponyms have been transformed into instances of geographical objects, their categorization mapped onto the GeoNames categories and relevant administrative entities linked to the related semantic resources featured by the ISPRA and ISTAT databases.The first version of this semantic gazetteer has been updated, fixing several problems: attributes have been aligned, many geographical objects have been disambiguated and an empirical evaluation of the footprint of the objects is proposed. The new version of the gazetteer can be used as test for a (semi)automatic geo-referencing service for biodiversity data that can be made available to the users through the LifeWatch Service Centre.
Geo-referencing of biodiversity data in the LifeWatch Italy infrastructure: updates and perspectives
De Felici S;Oggioni A;Fugazza C;Cianferoni F;
2018
Abstract
The current availability of devices capable of associating geographical objects with their positions on Earth only partially solves the problems related to the location of biodiversity data and, in any case, does not concern the data produced up to a recent past.The resolution of a toponym, that is the mapping process from a place name to its "spatial footprint", requires a procedure to convert a textual description of locality into a "formal" representation, expressed through coordinates and an adequate representation of uncertainty. At the heart of this process is the availability of a gazetteer, i.e. a controlled vocabulary of place names and related positions.LifeWatch Italy has undertaken the preparation of a gazetteer with a semantic approach starting from the "Toponyms IGM" information layer made available by the Italian National Geoportal. Using the GeoNames ontology, the toponyms have been transformed into instances of geographical objects, their categorization mapped onto the GeoNames categories and relevant administrative entities linked to the related semantic resources featured by the ISPRA and ISTAT databases.The first version of this semantic gazetteer has been updated, fixing several problems: attributes have been aligned, many geographical objects have been disambiguated and an empirical evaluation of the footprint of the objects is proposed. The new version of the gazetteer can be used as test for a (semi)automatic geo-referencing service for biodiversity data that can be made available to the users through the LifeWatch Service Centre.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
