University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

I\'ve added a feature to my [Biodiversity Heritage Library
viewer](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2009/11/biodiversity-heritage-library-viewer.html)
that should help make sense of the names found on a page. Until now
I\'ve displayed them as a list of \"tags\", which ignores the relations
among the names. Based on some code I\'d developed for my [e-Biosphere
09 challenge
entry](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2009/05/e-biosphere-challenge-visualising.html)
I\'ve added a \"tag tree\" that displays the classification of the names
found on a BHL page:  
  

::: {style="text-align:center;"}
![big.png](http://lh3.ggpht.com/_Gct8lVAxKqQ/SvrzTE2QSUI/AAAAAAAAAk4/wQOC5ED0e5A/big.png?imgmax=800){border="0"
width="400" height="217"}
:::

  
The idea is that a set of names can make much more sense if you know
what kind of organism they are referring to. For example, I don\'t know
what *Onetes* is, but if I look at [BHL page
2298380](http://iphylo.org/~rpage/bhl/viewer.php?PageID=2298380) I can
see that it\'s an insect:  
  

::: {style="text-align:center;"}
![Onetes.png](http://lh3.ggpht.com/_Gct8lVAxKqQ/Svru_3Atj3I/AAAAAAAAAks/jvzxLGUeHSY/Onetes.png?imgmax=800){border="0"
width="218" height="170"}
:::

  
The names in gray don\'t occur on the page, but do occur in the tree
that links those names (the latter are highlighed in black). The tag
tree can be useful for separating out host and parasite, e.g. [BHL page
2298491](http://iphylo.org/~rpage/bhl/viewer.php?PageID=%202298491) is
about a flea and it\'s mammalian hosts:  
  

::: {style="text-align:center;"}
![flea.png](http://lh5.ggpht.com/_Gct8lVAxKqQ/SvrwNuDQkHI/AAAAAAAAAkw/4U8jEVpZSUo/flea.png?imgmax=800){border="0"
width="193" height="362"}
:::

  
The tag tree can also flag names that might be mistaken, such as those
found on [page
2298330](http://iphylo.org/~rpage/bhl/viewer.php?PageID=2298330):  
  

::: {style="text-align:center;"}
![mistake.png](http://lh6.ggpht.com/_Gct8lVAxKqQ/SvrxyWTSrYI/AAAAAAAAAk0/E1rp5HyS5ZU/mistake.png?imgmax=800){border="0"
width="226" height="354"}
:::

  
This page has names of some grasshoppers from Madagascar, as well as the
name of a butterfly (*Tsaratanana*), which seems a little odd. Looking
at the text, we discover that \"Tsaratanana\" is Mont. Tsaratanana a
mountain in Madagascar. It would be fun to develop tools to annotate
such cases so that somebody looking for the butterfly won\'t be
presented with this page.  
  
**How it works**  
  
The inspiration for this tag tree came from several sources. David
Remsen has often used an example of finding a fly name in the middle of
a book on birds as being of interest, and the NCBI have a subtree view
of taxa in a PubMed article. My own tag tree is constructed by finding
for each name the ancestor-descendant path in a local, modified copy of
the [Catalogue of Life](http://www.catalogueoflife.org) database, then
assembling those paths into a tree. Because not all the names on a BHL
page are in the Catalogue of Life, there may be names that aren\'t
classified. These are simply listed below the tag tree (see image
above).  


I've added a feature to my Biodiversity Heritage Library viewer that should help make sense of the names found on a page. Until now I've displayed them as a list of "tags", which ignores the relations among the names.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Tag trees: displaying the taxonomy of names in BHL