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

New York Botanical Garden, Bronx NY

Investigators

Abstract

Proposal # DBI-BDI: 0345225 PI: Thiers Abstract The New York Botanical Garden has been awarded a grant in collaboration with Yale University and the University of Illinois 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.