Figure 1

Schematic diagram of data elements found in taxonomic publications and exemplar cybertaxonomic resources appropriate to hosting each data class. Semantic tagging of text elements, images, taxonomic nomenclature, and specimen data can be applied retrospectively to legacy publications using tools such as GoldenGATE (http://plazi.org/?q=GoldenGATE). Tagging can also be part of the prospective production process for new taxonomic manuscripts. Some electronic data elements in new papers (for example, DNA sequences) are currently deposited in online repositories by authors. A registered GUID (globally unique identifier) included in the metadata of all electronic data sets links derivative datasets back to the original source publication. BOLD, Barcode of Life Database (http://www.barcodinglife.com/); DOI, Digital Object Identifier (http://www.doi.org/); Dryad (http://datadryad.org/); EOL, Encyclopedia of Life (http://www.eol.org/); GBIF, Global Biodiversity Information Facility (http://data.gbif.org); GenBank (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/); Global Names Architecture (http://globalnames.org/); LSID, Life Science Identifier, Morphbank (http://www.morphbank.net); IPNI, International Plant Names Index (http://www.ipni.org/); Plazi (http://plazi.org/); XML, Extensible Markup Language (http://www.w3.org/XML/); ZooBank (http://www.zoobank.org/).