Bryan Heidorn, Associate Professor of Library and Information Science, UIUC
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P. Bryan Heidorn is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997. His research interests include information retrieval, text processing and digital libraries use in context. His work includes a redefinition of the book into electronic format with higher functionality for different user groups. His primary area of application is biological informatics including scientific communication, automatic markup of unstructured text for enhanced information retrieval, information extraction and information structuring from a variety of biological information resources ranging from images of natural history museum specimens to natural language description of location and taxonomic literature. This includes projects reprocessing of flora and fauna to XML for indexing and access, interactive keys and visualization. Ongoing research projects include the Biological Information Browsing Environment (BIBE), an environment for creating, indexing and accessing XML and full text documents (http://www.biobrowser.org), OpenKey, a set of tools to help construct XML based interactive keys in collaborations over the internet (http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/ openkey), and TeleNature, a mobile wireless network for facilitation biodiversity surveys (http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/ telenature). In Herbis (http://www.herbis.org) we use machine learning techniques to identify and extract taxonomic, collector, location, date and other information from OCR of museum records. In the BioGeomancer project (http://www.biogeomancer.org) we work with a large consortium using machine learning, spatial gazetteers, mapping, spatial and ecological validation to resolve geolocations (latitude, longitude, precision and certainty) based on natural language descriptions of location. Professor Heidorn works on biological standards committees in the Taxonomic Working Group in concert with the Global Biodiversity information Facility to develop ontologies for biological description.
