Collaborative Research: Rapid Digital Specimen Image and Data Capture: A Web Services Solution

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Proposal # DBI-BDI: 0345387 PI: Heidorn Abstract The University of Illinois has been awarded a grant in collaboration with Yale University and the New York Botanical Garden to create a system to image specimens in natural history collections (plant specimens in this case), use Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Natural Handwriting Recognition (NHR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to read the labels on the specimens and parse the label data into its component fields, then enter the data into a database. Modular, configurable, open source web services will provide interoperability and scalability in mirrored, distributed environments. This project will make the data capture of natural history collections much more efficient and lower the associated time and costs per specimen digitized.