From XML to XML: The Why and How of Making the Biodiversity Literature Accessible to Researchers

Alistair Willis, David King, David Morse, Anton Dil, Chris Lyal, Dave Roberts


Abstract
We present the ABLE document collection, which consists of a set of annotated volumes of the Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). These were developed during our ongoing work on automating the markup of scanned copies of the biodiversity literature. Such automation is required if historic literature is to be used to inform contemporary issues in biodiversity research. We consider an enhanced TEI XML markup language, which is used as an intermediate stage in translating from the initial XML obtained from Optical Character Recognition to taXMLit, the target annotation schema. The intermediate representation allows additional information from external sources such as a taxonomic thesaurus to be incorporated before the final translation into taXMLit. We give an overview of the project workflow in automating the markup process, and consider what extensions to existing markup schema will be required to best support working taxonomists. Finally, we discuss some of the particular issues which were encountered in converting between different XML formats.
Anthology ID:
L10-1542
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/787_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alistair Willis, David King, David Morse, Anton Dil, Chris Lyal, and Dave Roberts. 2010. From XML to XML: The Why and How of Making the Biodiversity Literature Accessible to Researchers. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
From XML to XML: The Why and How of Making the Biodiversity Literature Accessible to Researchers (Willis et al., LREC 2010)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/787_Paper.pdf