Welcome to Community-driven Curation for Taxonomic Databases

This website is developed to provide community-driven curation tools to engage the biodiversity community in crowd-sourcing based collaborative activities, e.g., taxonomic name curation and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) error correction in the scanned biodiversity literature.

This website will support the JISC-Funded ComTax Project, A Community-driven Curation Process for Taxonomic Databases, in the Open University (OU), UK. This project aims to develop and establish a community-driven curation process among practising taxonomists. The project will combine recommending new texts to users with an online verification process in order to engage the biodiversity community in collaborative taxonmic database curation. Potential undiscovered taxonomic names with associated taxonomic descriptions are automatically extracted from biodiversity literature and are presented to a wide range of taxonomic curators. Multiple human judgements are collected for taxonomic name validation.

The project deliverables will facilitate and improve the curation process by developing an automated tool to exploit historic legacy of scientific literature and providing a Scratchpad-based web service to allow biodiversity researchers work collaboratively as a team.

To learn more about this Project, please visit our OU project website, ComTax Project.