The GBIF web parser service is a good step in that direction.
http://tools.gbif.org/nameparser/
Select the test names and review the extended output.
David On Dec 9, 2010, at 3:09 PM, Bob Morris wrote:
...
Obviously, it would be nice if algorithms did exist which could convert a text string into a scientific name, but this still lies in the future.
For those of us attempting to populate databases with information extracted from published literature, the future is now. It seems to me that normalizing the extraction to some standardized form \before/ putting it in the database is more robust than forcing the parsing to be done afterwards. So we need rules for those forms, and an unambiguous way in our metadata to cite which rules have been followed. In a previous post my p.s. also whined about a similar need for born-digital taxonomic treatments.
Bob
-- Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile) _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content