Abstract
We analyzed the corpus of three geoscientific journals to investigate if there are enough locational references in research articles to apply a geographical search method, such as the example of New Zealand. Based on all available abstracts and all freely available papers of the “New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics”, the “New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research”, and the “Journal of Hydrology, New Zealand”, we searched title, abstracts, and full texts for place name occurrences that match records from the official Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) gazetteer. We generated ISO standard compliant metadata records for each article including the spatial references and made them available in a public catalogue service. This catalogue can be queried for articles based on authors, titles, keywords, topics, and spatial reference. We visualize the results in a map to show which area the research articles are about, and how much and how densely geographic space is described through these geoscientific research articles by mapping mentioned place names by their geographic locations. We outlined the methodology and technical framework for the geo-referencing of the journal articles and the platform design for this knowledge inventory. The results indicate that the use of well-crafted abstracts for journal articles with carefully chosen place names of relevance for the article provides a guideline for geographically referencing unstructured information like journal articles and reports in order to make such resources discoverable through geographical queries. Lastly, this approach can actively support integrated holistic assessment of water resources and support decision making.
Highlights
Resource management decisions are based on knowledge and insights gained from environmental information and data
There was only one paper that had half of the place names correct and the rest of the papers had less than half or none of the place names correct
We described an approach to make journal articles discoverable through ISO/ANZLIC metadata records, which can be searched for in Catalogue Service for Web (CSW)-enabled catalogues including spatial search constraints
Summary
Resource management decisions are based on knowledge and insights gained from environmental information and data. Data collection, samples and specimen observations are taken at distinct locations, i.e., places, in order to represent a larger space. Such information and data are often scattered between different institutions and is not stored or made accessible based on national or international standards. Web-based GIS provides a means to process and analyze spatio-temporal data from distributed sources and derive valuable information to inform policy development [3,4]. Supporting standard compliant interfaces is expected to enable multi-level and interdisciplinary decision making processes [5]
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