Taxonomic Name Curation

The project works with an initial selection of scanned scientific volumes taken from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) as exemplar datasets. we annotate 4 digitized Biologia Centrali-Americana (BCA) volumes, which include 1 Bird BCA volume, 1 Fish BCA volume, and 2 Beetle BCA volumes: 

  • Bird BCA Volume:   Biologia Centrali-Americana, Aves, Volume I (1879-1904) by Osbert Salvin and F. DuCane Godman. [BHL]  [Enter Curation]
  • Fish BCA Volume:   Biologia Centrali-Americana, Pisces (1906-1908) by Charles Tate Regan. [BHL] [Enter Curation]
  • Beetle I BCA Volume:  Biologia Centrali-Americana, Insecta, Coleoptera, Volume I, Part 1 (1881-1884) by Henry Walter Bates. [BHL] [Enter Curation]
  • Beetle II BCA Volume:   Biologia Centrali-Americana, Insecta, Coleopetera, Rhynchophora, Volume IV, Part 3 (1889-1911) by David Sharp and G. C. Champion. [BHL] [Enter Curation]

In each BCA volume, a list of potential taxonomic name are identified from the text. The names then are mapped into three existing large-scale taxonomic databases,  Catalogue of Life (CoL),  uBio Name Bank, and Encyclopedia of Life (EoL). Taxonomic names that cannot be found in these taxonomic databases are collected as potentially new taxonomic names for validation. 

Each new taxonomic name is presented on a particular web page, together with relevant contextual descriptions extracted from the text. On the LEFT MENU, please select one of the BCA volumes that you wish to examine.  A navigation page for the taxonomic name list will be shown in the index page of each volume. 

Scratchpads developed and conceived by (alphabetical): Ed Baker, Katherine Bouton Alice Heaton Dimitris Koureas, Laurence Livermore, Dave Roberts, Simon Rycroft, Ben Scott, Vince Smith