What is the GNRS?

The Geographic Name Resolution Service (GNRS) is a tool for resolving, standardizing, and indexing political division names. The GNRS resolves political division names against standard world political units in the Geonames and Global Administrative Areas (GADM) databases. Names are resolved to three levels: country, state/province and county/parish. The GNRS uses both exact and fuzzy matching to match standard and alternative political division names in a variety of languages, as well as abbreviations and codes such as ISO and FIPS codes. Results returned by the GNRS include the original names submitted, the standard names and codes of the political units matched, unique identifiers from the Geonames and GADM databases, and additional fields describe how each name was resolved. An overall match score from 0-1 describes how closely the submitted names matches standard names, where 1 is a perfect match. For more details on the information returned by the GNRS, see our Data Dictionary

Why use the GNRS?

Resolving political division names with the GNRS is a critical step in checking the accuracy of geocoordinates accompanied by political divisions. For example, once the political division has been resolved to a political unit in the GADM database, the geocoordinates can then be joined to the shapefile for that political unit. Points falling outside the political unit can then be excluded from further analysis, or investigated and corrected.

Project development

The GNRS was developed by the Botanical Information and Ecology Network (BIEN) as a data validation tool for the BIEN botanical observation database.

Project conception and direction
Brad Boyle University of Arizona
Brian Enquist University of Arizona

Application development
Brad Boyle: GNRS database, search engine and api.
Brian Maitner: RGNRS R package.
George C. Barbosa: GNRSweb React/Node.js user interface.
Rethvick Sriram Yugendra Babu: GNRSweb React/Node.js user interface.

Source code

Source code for all GNRS components is publicly available from the following repositories:

GNRS Search Engine, Database and API: https://github.com/ojalaquellueva/gnrs
Geonames-to-Postgres (dependency): https://github.com/ojalaquellueva/geonames
GADM-to-Postgres (dependency): https://github.com/ojalaquellueva/gadm
GNRS R package: https://github.com/EnquistLab/RGNRS

Funding

Funding provided by the National Science Foundation Plant Cyberinfrastructure Program (grant #DBI-0735191) and National Science Foundation Harnessing the Data Revolution Grant HDR 1934790 to Brian J. Enquist.