Georiferimento di campioni museali nell'infrastruttura LifeWatch Italia: le nuove prospettive dal web semantico

Geo-referencing is one of the most problematic and troublesome steps in digitization of occurrence data. In museum samples, spatial references are typically provided as textual description of localities, an "informal" technique that requires appropriate processing in order to become a "formal" representation. The e-Biodiversity Research Institute LifeWatch-Italy is proposing an innovative approach for processing of geographic objects. This approach, which follows the GeoNames ontology, considers localities as "concepts", thus enabling: a) to loosen their connections with names and with static geographic representations and b) to explicitly insert them in the network of spatial and semantic relationships with other entities. It was decided to formalize the Italian place names taken from the IGM plates ("tavolette"), an authoritative source of place names, according to these principles and in order to use these in the museum or biodiversity domain.