Biodiversity Information Projects of the World

Automatic Biodiversity Literature Enhancement

Project Website

http://able.myspecies.info/

Project Description

ABLE is a collaboration between two UK based institutions, the Open University and the Natural History Museum, London. It aims to improve access to collections of scanned taxonomic documents.
We are developing tools to automatically mark up documents from existing large scale scanning projects, such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The scale of BHL, which is scanning pages at the rate of 600,000 a month has determined the need for automatic mark up.
We focus on extracting metadata (taxon, people and place names, and dates) and to enhance the searchability of those terms by using associative techniques from Natural Language Processing (NLP) to overcome errors in the text such as those introduced through Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Contact

David (known as Dauvit) King
Research Associate
The Open University

Project Type

Facilitator

Project Language

English

Project Start Date

01-Oct-2008

Project End Date

23-Feb-2010

Key Inputs

JISC: funding as part of their Enriching Digital Resources programme
BHL: data as part of their digitisation programme

Key Infrastructure

EDIT Scratchpads (based on Drupal) for project communication and dissemination

Key Technologies

PHP, Java, Python, XML, XSL, XPath

Key Processes

Manual and automated XML mark up
Information extraction with fuzzy matching

Geographic Scope

Taxonomic Scope

Comments

Record Status

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