Today is the official launch of the GBIF funded project to mark up all the fish, ant and platygasteroid wasps papers published in Zootaxa using Taxonx, make all the descriptions online accessible at plazi (and hopefully soon at Zoobank and other sites), and feed all the names into Zoobank. In return, all the marked up names will be enhanced using LSID fed from Zoobank or domain specific name servers.

Progress can be monitored at http://plazi.org:8080/GgSRS/search at journal/publisher="Zootaxa".

The project PI is Zhi-Qiang Zhang at Zootaxa. We expect to mark up about 300 publications, including ca 600 new and 6.000 old names and minimally 600 descriptions. Additionally all the names published in any of the 3.600 papers published since 2001 will be entered into Zoobank. It will last one 18 months.

We appreciate any comments, questions and hope that the result will not only be content but convince our community to consider making their own publications machine readable and accessible to the world, and make links to the treatments from your own thematic Web sites.

Donat

Dr. Donat Agosti

Science Consultant

Research Associate, American Museum of Natural History and Naturmuseum der Burgergemeinde Bern

Email: agosti@amnh.org

Web: http://antbase.org/ http://antbase.org

Blog: http://biodivcontext.blogspot.com/ http://biodivcontext.blogspot.com/

Skype: agostileu

CV http://antbase.org/agosticv_2003.html

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