<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 1/6/22 11:03 AM, Marie Angel wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:E1538C16-8929-4B52-9FD7-213CE94ECEA8@gmail.com">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
Hi,
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">In Geolocate’s collaborative georeferencing web
client (<a
href="https://www.geo-locate.org/web/WebComGeoref.aspx"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext" moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.geo-locate.org/web/WebComGeoref.aspx</a>),
if you click on the small blue and white plus sign on the right
side, it will show different base layers and overlays. Under
“overlays” there is an option to show US counties.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">I hope this helps!</div>
</blockquote>
<p>Hi, Marie.</p>
<p>Now that you point out where this feature is, it's good to see
that they have it. However, what would help here is if GeoLocate
had a more user-friendly interface. I can't see how you and other
using GL can deal with specimen label data capture without
introducing unnecessary uncertainty.</p>
<p>Consider this specimen label:</p>
<p>17 mi W Carrizozo, Lincoln Co., NM</p>
<p>Unless I'm missing something, GeoLocate does not have a tool to
create a path that measures <b>exactly 17 road miles</b> W of
Carrizozo. Google Earth does. It turns out, in fact, using Google
Earth with the county lines layer restored, that this locality
label is wrong, because if you drive 17 miles west from Carrizozo
(there's only one road, and it goes mostly NW), you cross the
county line into Socorro county at around 13 miles. I don't see a
way to tell in GL how far that county line is from Carrizozo, the
way you can using Google Earth.</p>
<p>When I was researching georeferencing protocols for legacy
specimens (anything without lat/long data on the label) for a
major NSF grant, I did numerous side-by-side comparisons of
various available tools, and while GeoLocate gave very rapid
answers, it always underperformed in terms of accuracy, with a
much higher error rate and uncertainty radius compared to manual
lookups using Google Earth. Points generated using GL would often
be several miles away from the actual location, so what one saved
in time (admittedly substantial) was undermined by a very
significant loss of accuracy. I can give very concrete examples,
for anyone interested in nitpicky details.</p>
<p>Thanks,<br>
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Doug Yanega Dept. of Entomology Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314 skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html">https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html</a>
"There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82</pre>
</body>
</html>