A Data Mining Approach for Standardization of Collectors Names in Herbarium Database

Botanical scientific collections databases are of vital importance for the study of biodiversity. Records maintained in these databases serve several biological research and are evidence of the occurrence of species in nature. Despite the steady increase in the volume of data available in scientific collections of research institutions and their herbaria, data quality is still not ideal and requires considerable effort of researchers in these data cleaning process. This paper presents a methodology to assess, identify suspicious records and for standardization collectors names of specimens. The methodology involves the application of data mining, specifically the association rules analysis, using the Apriori algorithm. The case study performed the database Jabot of Rio de Janeiro Botanic Garden Research Institute.