Measuring volunteered geodata performance in the text-to-GPS linkage of field-captured locality records

GIS applications that link natural language text to geographic space using gazetteers are essential for managing spatial data in archived geological records. However, these applications face limitations due to limited gazetteer scope of coverage. Crowdsourced gazetteers often have global coverage, making them excellent reference data for resolving spatial details in records, including converting textual descriptions of locations to GPS features. This can be useful for rectifying missing GPS information in field-captured geological records, especially those obtained from remote and hard-to-reach areas. However, accurately transforming location descriptions in text to GPS coordinates is challenging, and reference data quality can be crucial in minimizing errors and uncertainties. A list of mineral specimen localities referencing geological sampling sites in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut were geoparsed using Geonames and OpenStreetMap geocoders and match rates, positional accuracy, and lexical similarity were quantified to assess performance.