<div dir="ltr">Hi David,<div><br></div><div style>You might want to look at GeoNames - you can download the data and import it onto your own app pretty easily.</div><div style><br></div><div style>Han did this pretty quickly last summer. </div>
<div style><br></div><div style>If it not perfect for your needs you might find it useful since it contains useful language variations for locations.</div><div style><br></div><div style><a href="http://www.geonames.org/export/">http://www.geonames.org/export/</a><br>
</div><div style><br></div><div style><a href="http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/">http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/</a><br></div><div style><br></div><div style>- Pete</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 9:57 AM, Shorthouse, David <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:davidpshorthouse@gmail.com" target="_blank">davidpshorthouse@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Folks,<br>
<br>
The Canadensys development team, <a href="http://www.canadensys.net" target="_blank">http://www.canadensys.net</a> is looking<br>
for efficient, low-maintenance ways to validate and reconcile data in<br>
its National cache of occurrence data. We are working on a Java<br>
library to initially tackle single-field Darwin Core validations,<br>
<a href="https://github.com/Canadensys/narwhal-processor" target="_blank">https://github.com/Canadensys/narwhal-processor</a>. We hope this library<br>
is sufficiently generalized for uses outside our project.<br>
<br>
Our current challenge is to reconcile country names, which requires<br>
access to an up-to-date, well-maintained knowledge base of country<br>
names, their alternative representations (possibly multilingual), and<br>
mappings to known misspellings. For performance reasons, we'd like<br>
this thesaurus to be embedded in the library, but with the capacity to<br>
be periodically refreshed with data pulled from external resources<br>
such as <a href="http://dbpedia.org" target="_blank">dbpedia.org</a>. This clearly has ties to semantic web thinking<br>
and, because we're new to the tools and services in this space, we'd<br>
like to solicit pointers and feedback such that we build this part of<br>
our library with maximal benefit to other projects. We started<br>
collecting thoughts here:<br>
<a href="https://github.com/Canadensys/narwhal-processor/issues/14" target="_blank">https://github.com/Canadensys/narwhal-processor/issues/14</a>.<br>
<br>
Cheers,<br>
<br>
David P. Shorthouse<br>
Christian Gendreau<br>
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</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">-------------------------------</div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">
Pete DeVries</div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Semantic Web / Linked Open Data</div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">
<a href="http://eol.org/" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">Encyclopedia of Life</a></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Marine Biological Laboratory </div>
<div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">7 MBL Street Woods Hole MA 02543</div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">
Email: <a href="mailto:pdevries@mbl.edu" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">pdevries@mbl.edu</a></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">
<br></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">University of Wisconsin - Madison Entomology</div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">
<a href="http://www.taxonconcept.org/" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">TaxonConcept</a> / GeoSpecies Knowledge Bases</div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">
Email: <a href="mailto:pdevries@wisc.edu" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">pdevries@wisc.edu</a></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">
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