A Gazetteer for Biodiversity Data as a Linked Open Data Solution

Biodiversity studies all life forms that we find in nature. The maintenance of biological diversity is important because it is essential to life on Earth. The lack of accurate spatial geographic information in species occurrence data, especially from diversity rich regions (like the Amazon Forest), leads to problems in many conservation activities, such as systematic planning for the protection of endangered species. In this paper, we present a gazetteer (a geographical directory that associate name places to geographic coordinates) for biodiversity data that is available as an Linked Open Data resource (using a GeoSPARQL Endpoint) and show how it can be used to improve inaccurate geographic collection data. We compared the efficiency of our Gazetteer with three openly available resources, Geonames, WikiMapia and Wikipedia, and got a 10% better recall rate than these endpoints. We also used the Gazetteer to correct geographic data from a big record sample (327,000 occurrence records) from Species Link and GBIF (two big open access repositories of biodiversity occurrence data). In this data set, we were able to add geographic coordinates to around 14% of records that did not have them before.