[tdwg] Country name reconciliation

[Shorthouse, David]

Dave & Tim,

Can you describe the linkage between the Drupal-based GBIF vocabulary
server and the dictionaries in your parsers? Is the former used to
seed the latter? How often does the latter get refreshed from data
produced in the former? Does all that work take place in Refine? If
you have published a white paper on this workflow already, could you
point me to it so I can better understand the depth of the maintenance
costs?

Cheers,

David

On Sat, May 18, 2013 at 8:50 PM, David Remsen <dremsen at gbif.org> wrote:
> David,
>
> You might like to use the GBIF vocabulary server.  It has a multi-lingual
> country name thesaurus based on ISO 3166 and has over 23K terms for 226 ISO
> countries.  You can download the data or use the service.  It may have some
> lexical variants and misspellings.  You can also get an account and add any
> you might know of.   And all presented to you in your old friend Drupal.
> Perhaps you might like to serve as curator.  Maybe?  Diamond in the rough
> here, I'm sure of it.
>
> http://vocabularies.gbif.org/vocabularies/country
>
> Best,
> Dave
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> David Remsen
> Global Biodiversity Information Facility Secretariat
> Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark
> Tel: +1 508 289 7477   Fax: +1 508 289 7900
> Mobile +1 508 274 4055
> Skype: dremsen
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
>
>
> On May 17, 2013, at 10:39 AM, Matt Jones wrote:
>
> A good official list of countries is available from the Library of Congress:
>   http://www.loc.gov/standards/codelists/countries.xml
>   For background, see: http://www.loc.gov/marc/countries/
>
> And of course there's ISO 3166, the list of country codes:
>
> http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/country_codes/country_names_and_code_elements_xml.htm
>   http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes
>
> Not sure about the alternate representations and misspellings, though.
>
> Matt
>
>
> On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 5:57 AM, Shorthouse, David
> <davidpshorthouse at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Folks,
>>
>> The Canadensys development team, http://www.canadensys.net is looking
>> for efficient, low-maintenance ways to validate and reconcile data in
>> its National cache of occurrence data. We are working on a Java
>> library to initially tackle single-field Darwin Core validations,
>> https://github.com/Canadensys/narwhal-processor. We hope this library
>> is sufficiently generalized for uses outside our project.
>>
>> Our current challenge is to reconcile country names, which requires
>> access to an up-to-date, well-maintained knowledge base of country
>> names, their alternative representations (possibly multilingual), and
>> mappings to known misspellings. For performance reasons, we'd like
>> this thesaurus to be embedded in the library, but with the capacity to
>> be periodically refreshed with data pulled from external resources
>> such as dbpedia.org. This clearly has ties to semantic web thinking
>> and, because we're new to the tools and services in this space, we'd
>> like to solicit pointers and feedback such that we build this part of
>> our library with maximal benefit to other projects. We started
>> collecting thoughts here:
>> https://github.com/Canadensys/narwhal-processor/issues/14.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> David P. Shorthouse
>> Christian Gendreau
>> _______________________________________________
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>> tdwg at lists.tdwg.org
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>
>
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