Discussion of georeferencing promotion and education

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Guide to Best Practices in Georeferencing

The document provides guidelines to best practices for adding accurate geographical information (georeferencing) to biological species data. Contains examples for different location types, and provides information and examples on how to determine the extent and maximum uncertainty distance for locations based on the information provided.

Ref: Chapman, A.D. and J. Wieczorek (eds). 2006. Guide to Best Practices for Georeferencing. Copenhagen: Global Biodiversity Information Facility. http://www2.gbif.org/BioGeomancerGuide.pdf

BioGeomancer Georeferencing Workbench

This web-based tool provides semi-automated single and batch georeferencing that follows the principle set out in the Guide to Best Practices for Georeferencing (see above) and is able to georeference several of the locality types (http://groups.google.com/group/biogeomancer-workbench-support/web/understandlocalities) set out in that document.

Ref: BioGeomancer?. 2006. BioGeomancer? Consortium.

http://biogeomancer.org (About BioGeomancer?)

http://bg.berkeley.edu/latest (BioGeomancer? Workbench)

http://groups.google.com/group/biogeomancer-workbench-support/web/biogeomancer-workbench-help?pli=1 (BioGeomancer? Help)

Principles of Data Quality

The rapid increase in the exchange and availability of taxonomic and species-occurrence data has made data quality principles important, as users of the data begin to require more and more detail on the quality of this information.

Ref: Chapman, A. D. 2005. Principles of Data Quality, version 1.0. Report for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, Copenhagen. http://www2.gbif.org/DataQuality.pdf

Principles and Methods of Data Cleaning

Error prevention is far superior to error detection and cleaning, but no matter how efficient the process of data entry, error will still occur. Therefore, data validation and correction cannot be ignored, especially when dealing with legacy biodiversity data and this manual helps to correctly face these issues.

Ref: Chapman, A. D. 2005. Principles and Methods of Data Cleaning – Primary Species and Species-Occurrence Data, version 1.0. Report for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, Copenhagen. http://www2.gbif.org/DataCleaning.pdf