[Taxacom] Links to literature pdf's in IPNI[Scanned] and antbase

[Donat Agosti]

At http://antbase.org , in collaboration with the Hymenoptera Name Server
(http://atbi.biosci.ohio-state.edu:210/hymenoptera/nomenclator.home_page)
and the Smithsonian Institution we have all the non-copyrighted descriptions
(here some more details
http://biodivcontext.blogspot.com/2007/05/access-to-taxonomic-descriptions-a
nd_11.html)  to ca 18,000 ant taxonomic names linked to their original
descriptions, that is to a pdf copy of the original page. This includes over
4,100 publications and ca 88,000 pages.

In a next step in collaboration with the Internet Archive and antweb, we
OCR-ed all these publications and they are accessible via
http://www.archive.org/details/ant_texts .

The next step is that we mark them up in our taxonomy specific XML schema,
Taxonx (http://wiki.cs.umb.edu/twiki/bin/view/Ants/TaxonxSchema) , which
marks up taxonomic names, and more importantly, the structure of
descriptions. That is, we have elements marking up the begin and end of the
description, the nomenclatorial section defining to which taxonx a specific
description belongs, the material examined etc. This then allows not only
much more efficient searches since the documents are full text and marked
up, but also to retrieve not just the page, but the respective protologues.
And since the elements in a protologue are also marked up, links can be made
to citation, other taxon within the publications, etc.

This then could be used by mashup's like Rod Page's ispecies (see here an
example:
http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/ispecies/?q=Proceratium+google&#x0026
;#x0026;#x0026;submit=Go).
Right now, we are setting up a test bed including the entire ant literature
covering Madagascar (http://antbase.org/databases/madagascar.htm). For the
mark-up process, we developed a mark-up program, GoldenGATE which can be
downloaded.

Donat Agosti


-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Paul van
Rijckevorsel
Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2007 8:14 PM
To: taxacom
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Links to literature pdf's in IPNI[Scanned]

From: "Paul Kirk" <p.kirk at cabi.org>
> Index Fungorum already does this for the fungi ... with 18000 names
> already linked up to page images (jpg) of original descriptions and
> several thousand more in the pipeline. It's not rocket science.

***
That is great! An example to be followed!

Based on a quick check I get the impression that links to a page in a
checklist (Page Image in Published List) are much more common than links to
the original publication (Page Image for Protologue), so I am a little wary
of the 18000 links to "page images (jpg) of original descriptions". ;-) But
a great achievement nonetheless!

How do authors of new names feel about contributing .pdf's (or .jpg's) of
the protologues ?
Paul



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