Tdikow Diptera Revision Talk
Transcript of Tdikow Diptera Revision Talk
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 & 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
» ...