Annex 4 - Biodiversity Enhanced Location Services (BELS)
In order to make the georeferences produced during the course of the project easily and openlyavailable, we developed a gazetteer of all distinct combinations of terms of the Darwin Core Location classcoming from data aggregated in GBIF and iDigBio using snapshot of both sources from January 2021. All
Locations georeferenced during the CESP project are in the process of being added to the gazetteer as well.
This gazetteer forms an integral part of the Biodiversity Enhanced Location Services (BELS) discussed in thecommunityforum"Imagininga
globalgazetteerofgeoreferences"(​https://www.idigbio.org/content/darwin-core-hour-2-bbqs-imagining-global-gazetteer-georeferences​).
The gazetteer contains preprocessed determinations of simplified representations of all Locations instrings for matching one Location with another. The simplifications are to increase the capacity to match twoLocations that are the same place even if there are variations in how they were captured textually. Examples ofsimplifications include a) the normalization of distinct Unicode characters that have the same meaning to a singlecommon value, b) removal of punctuation that does not affect numbers, c) setting all matching strings tolowercase, and d) the translation of accented characters to ASCII equivalents.
In addition, the gazetteer contains preprocessed determinations of the best existing spatial
representation, if any, for every matching string. The majority of matching strings have one or more spatial
representations that include at least coordinates. The best spatial representation among those existing for agiven matching string are determined by their compliance with georeferencing best practices (Chapman &Wieczorek 2020, Zermoglio et al. 2020) as well as by their ability to represent the whole set of possible spatial
representations for that string. The technical details for this and all other aspects of the gazetteer construction
are the subject of a manuscript in preparation.
To satisfy the goals of the project, we built a set of scripts, an API, and a skeletal user interface (codeavailable at ​https://github.com/VertNet/bels​) that allow users to submit one or more Darwin Core Locations via aCSV file for checking against the BELS gazetteer. Via the scripts, the API, or the web interface, input Locations
are processed to produce matching strings in exactly the same way they were made within the gazetteer. Thesematching strings can then be used to select the best existing georeference from among the Darwin Core
Locations that are the same place within the gazetteer. Using the web interface (temporarily at
https://localityservice.uc.r.appspot.com/ but eventually destiny for georeferencing.org), one can upload a file withLocations (and any additional data fields) and provide an email address. When the file has been uploaded andprocessed, the results, which include all of the input fields plus fields for the best georeference available, aresaved in a CSV file and the link to the file is sent to the email provided by the requester.
The code for the service is written in Python, while the infrastructure for the service and gazetteer rely
on a suite of Google products including App Engine (for the web application), PubSub (for the georeferencing
jobs spawned by the web app), Cloud Function (to process the jobs), Cloud Storage (for the uploaded and resultfiles), and the free version of the third party SendGrid libraries (to send the email announcing the finished job andlocation of the results file). The costs for the development of the gazetteer, API, and web interface were in-kind
contributions of the VertNet team to the project. The costs for services (data storage and processing) aresupported by the Field Museum of Natural History. As mentioned above, this service is also part of a broader
project, recently funded by a US National Science Foundation grant (​DBI- 2027241 "​Collaborative Research:CIBR: Leaping the Specimen Digitization Gap: Connecting Novel Tools, Machine Learning and Public
Participation to Label Digitization Efforts'', ​affectionately known as ("DigiLeap"), with a start date of January 2021.
DigiLeap aims to integrate Citizen Science through Notes from Nature with specimen records and tier images
stored in Simbiota and georeferenced through GEOLocate, which in turn will call on BELS to improvegeoreferencing capabilities. Sustainability for more development and improvement is therefore granted at least
for the next four years. It is our hope that the BELS can be integrated in the future with the GBIF infrastructure.