TreatmentBank
TreatmentBank is a resource that stores and provides access to the treatements and data therein.
What is a treatment?
The Plazi TreatmentBank deals with scientific, published, biosystematic literature. It is the literature documenting and describing all the world’s ca 1.9 Million known species in an estimated corpus of over 500 Million published pages. The cited publications in Plazi are all available at the Biodiversity Literature Repository at Zenodo/CERN.
Treatments are well defined parts of articles that define the particular usage of a scientific name by an author at a given time (the publication). With other words, each scientific name has one to several treatments, depending whether there exists only an original description of a species, or whether there are subsequent re-descriptions. Similar to bibliographic references, treatments can be cited, and subsequent usages of names cite earlier treatments.
Treatments are a synthesis of the knowledge of a given species at a given time. They can be very rich in data, explicitly or implicitly, detailed or summarized, and include many references to external data sources, such as scientific names, collection codes, DNA-codes.
The data can be semantically enhanced, and linked. Treatments as parts of publication need be extracted. Most recently, treatments are tagged in electronic publications with the National Library of Medicine’s Journal Article Tag Suites (JATS) TaxPub extension. This allows automatic extraction. Still the majority of the ca. 2000 journals and books publishing treatments use the PDF format at best. Plazi has tools to extract treatments, enhance the embedded data and import it into its SRS- Treatment Search Portal for public online access.
The data, that is, treatments and observation data, can be viewed as HTML, XML, RDF, or can be harvested with the protocols provided below. The data is provided for harvesting as Darwin Core-Archives.
What is TreatmentBank?
Scientists describe and communicate the discovery of new biological species with taxonomic treatments that are bound to the names used to refer to these taxa. Often they are very rich in content and increasingly linked to external resources. TreatmentBank is a resource that stores and provides access to the treatements and data therein.