Plazi Markup Viewer



What is this?

The goal of this project is to understand how accurately Plazi is marking up material citations in documents. Parsing specimen information in publications is a challenging problem. Ideally we would have a way of checking whether the extracted data is correct. In the apparent absence of such tools I've created this web site.

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This site takes a Plazi treatment in XML form and displays the XML as a marked up web page. In other words, it displays the tags assigned to the text by Plazi. These tags are colour-coded, and there is a tooltip to show the corresponding tag name. The interpretation of the markup by Plazi is shown as a table of key-value pairs.

To use the web site simply paste in the Plazi treatment id (typically a UUID) and the site will display the marked up document. Below I have listed some examples where Plazi appears to have failed to correctly extract specimen data.

Some examples to explore

No specimens found
Treatment IDIssue
74CF9B715E205704A730270742F139CAMisses specimen
9319C4492C272A7EFF288BEBFC1849ABSplits one specimen into two
03F33310DA38FF875DB5FDF3FC2AF8CDSpecimen code interpreted as GenBank accession number
03FC87E61268FFD6D3E36CD2FE12DF29Cruise interpreted as collector, depth treated as elevation
DD4987C1FF96247CFF3DFC385F30FE6FCollector treated as locality, datum WGS84 interpreted as speicmen code
704ECD36FFF12173FD03EF56CEA6D97DSpecimen split, only first part parsed
023487907016FF9EDAC8FF48FAC1DA10Specimen split in two
C51DEB611E4C5421FF13F9ABA73729F7Failed to parse specimen citation
03E787D0FFB0FFDA7B8BD57CB2FE779EStation treated as colelctor, depth treated as elevation
03EB1A42265CFFE3FF1EF9B71C5AF92CMissed most information, confused collectors with places
6FE5DF2540375B7184495C6134814F7FBiodiversity Data Journal paper with structured data misinterpeted (origjnal paper doi:10.3897/BDJ.9.e64505)
252C87918B362C05FF20F8C5BFCB3D4ECollector initial interpeted as collection code, specimen code treated as accession number
6CA445F891624F8F86D89A7580F879D4
71F7952EADCA5025A7A45AE1C2811C3DNo specimens found
03FCA61B9A735210FF52F99DFCC38B27Missed lat lon
03A087FA2319FF86FF3D64CDFD9BBABCSplit one record into two, missed lat lon, duplicates in GBIF
03936656F63EE0DE7AB0FAF8FDE1F93BMultiple species run together
03EF1D76C8269652FF2FE282FDA10C3DMuseum conflated with locality (Germany versus Ecuador)
5244B05E-FFC8-E20F-7BC3-2056C178F496Type specimen for Bulbophyllum hamatum split into two specimens.
0D228E6AFFC2FFEFFF4DE8118C4EE6B9coordinates not parsed correctly (missed the degrees)

Parser tool

A version of the Plazi material citation parser is available as a web service. I have constructed a simple wrapper around that service so that you can paste in a specimen citation and see how Plazi interprets it.

Go to parser