Extracting information from previous taxonomic revisions

Torsten Dikow

Biodiversity Synthesis CenterField Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL, USA

Importance of Specimen data from Taxonomic Revisions

» GBIF – relies on museum databases

» Specimens from taxonomic revisions◊ often scattered in several museums◊ not all might serve data to GBIF

» Afrotropical Asilidae◊ Revisions by Jason Londt & myself◊ 21537 specimen records (1977–2003)◊ multitude of uses for such a database

» Specimen records can be submitted to GBIF a posteriori◊ Problem: double counting of specimens?◊ No unique identifier for each specimen

Harvesting other information from Taxonomic Revisions

» Illustrations

» Photographs

» Maps

» Identification Keys – Phoenix software

» Create a virtual library of everything that is known about a species

» Information can be used for EOL species pages

» Might be only information available for megadiverse taxa !

PLazi http://plazi.org/

PLazi & GoldenGATE Editor

» Plazi http://plazi.org/

“Plazi is an association supporting and promoting the development of persistent and openly accessible digital taxonomic literature.”

“Enhance submitted taxonomic treatments by creating taxonx XML versions.”

» GoldenGATE http://plazi.org/?q=GoldenGATE

“The GoldenGATE Document Editor is a visual editor for marking up documents in XML.”

Scanning of Literature & Text recognition

» Biodiversity Heritage Library http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/

» Desktop scanner

» Scan originals if possible (not copies/xeroxes) !

» Text recognition◊ OCR (Optical Character Recognition)◊ Adobe Acrobat◊ ABBY FineReader http://www.abbyy.com/

» Windows only» Plazi help http://plazi.ch/ocr/madagascar_ocr.html

Revisions

» EOL species pages

» Descriptions

» Illustrations

» ...