Plazi

Plazi is a Swiss-based international nonprofit association focused on converting taxonomic and biodiversity literature into persistent, openly accessible, machine-readable data. Its work sits at the intersection of biological taxonomy, biodiversity informatics, digital libraries, and open science. Rather than operating as a conventional consumer brand, Plazi functions as an infrastructure and standards-oriented organization whose services help researchers, repositories, publishers, and biodiversity platforms reuse information from scientific publications. The organization’s technical approach developed from a binational digital-library initiative involving the United States’ National Science Foundation and Germany’s Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, with work connected to the American Museum of Natural History and the University of Karlsruhe. That initiative explored XML-based ways to represent the structure and content of biosystematic literature. Plazi subsequently developed and applied tools and schemas that support the semantic conversion of legacy and newly published taxonomic documents. A central part of this work is the transformation of publications into structured taxonomic treatments: the sections of scientific papers that describe species, genera, families, and other taxonomic entities. Plazi has used the TaxonX schema and the GoldenGATE semi-automated editor to mark up documents and enrich them with semantic information. GoldenGATE also supports community participation in the preparation and enhancement of digitally structured literature. In later workflows, taxonomic treatments have been represented in TaxPub XML, making the information more suitable for preservation, discovery, and computational reuse. Plazi is a cofounder of the Biodiversity Literature Repository and maintains digital taxonomic literature in the repository hosted through Zenodo. The repository is intended to provide persistent access to FAIR-oriented data—information that is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable—derived from taxonomic publications. Plazi also contributes to TreatmentBank, a service and data environment for extracting, presenting, and distributing taxonomic treatments. The organization’s systems are designed to connect literature-derived data with wider biodiversity infrastructures. Distribution records from taxonomic publications can be exposed through a TAPIR service and harvested by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Treatment data can also be exchanged using the Species Page Model and Darwin Core Archives, enabling use by services such as the Encyclopedia of Life and other biodiversity information systems. Where available, records may be linked to external resources including GenBank, the Hymenoptera Name Server, and ZooBank. Plazi’s work has contributed to the broader development of e-taxonomy, in which scientific descriptions are not confined to static articles but are made available as linked, structured, and reusable data objects. The organization also promotes awareness of open access to scientific discourse and data. Its position on the reuse of taxonomic literature includes the argument that taxonomic treatments do not qualify as literary and artistic works under applicable copyright concepts and may therefore be in the public domain, while emphasizing the continuing scientific requirement for proper citation. Plazi’s impact is consequently measured less through commercial sales than through the availability, interoperability, and reuse of taxonomic information across research and biodiversity-data networks.

Plazi’s origins lie in a collaborative digital-library program supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Germany’s Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The program involved the American Museum of Natural History and the University of Karlsruhe and sought to develop a digital representation of biosystematic literature. A key outcome was the TaxonX XML schema, designed to model the structure and information contained in taxonomic publications. To apply this approach to existing literature, Plazi used GoldenGATE, a semi-automated editing and markup environment. The tool enables scientific documents to be converted into semantically enhanced digital objects rather than remaining available only as page images or unstructured text. Its design also allows community participation in the process of annotation and correction. This workflow provided a foundation for extracting taxonomic treatments and related facts from legacy publications. Plazi later expanded its work from document modeling into data distribution and interoperability. It developed methods for exposing distribution records through a TAPIR service, allowing biodiversity aggregators to harvest information from taxonomic literature. It also implemented the Species Page Model as a means of transferring taxonomic treatments to third-party platforms, including the Encyclopedia of Life. Darwin Core Archives became another important exchange format for distributing treatment and occurrence-related data to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. The organization became associated with the emerging field of e-taxonomy and biodiversity informatics, where taxonomic names, descriptions, specimen information, distribution records, and bibliographic sources are connected in machine-readable systems. Plazi’s treatment-centered approach helped make portions of scientific descriptions available as data units that can be indexed, linked, and reused independently of the surrounding article. Plazi is a cofounder of the Biodiversity Literature Repository and maintains taxonomic literature and related FAIR data in a Zenodo-based repository. Its work includes enhancing taxonomic treatments in TaxPub XML and supporting the TreatmentBank service. These activities are intended to preserve scientific content while improving its accessibility to researchers, data curators, aggregators, and other users. The organization has also promoted open access to scientific discourse and data. In discussions of copyright, Plazi has maintained that taxonomic treatments do not qualify as literary and artistic works and can therefore be freely used and disseminated as public-domain material, while recognizing that scientific norms require attribution and citation. This position forms part of its broader effort to make biodiversity knowledge reusable across institutional and technical boundaries. Plazi’s historical development is therefore best understood as a progression from XML modeling of taxonomic publications to an integrated infrastructure for markup, repository preservation, treatment extraction, and biodiversity-data exchange. The available reference material does not establish a specific founding year, named founder, detailed leadership history, or commercial ownership structure.

• Origins in an international digital-library program

  [1]Plazien.wikipedia.org

  The technical approach that later informed Plazi emerged from a digital-library program supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Germany’s Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, involving the American Museum of Natural History and the University of Karlsruhe.

• Development of the TaxonX schema

  [1]Plazien.wikipedia.org

  TaxonX was developed as an XML schema for modeling the content and structure of biosystematic literature.

• Expansion of literature markup through GoldenGATE

  [1]Plazien.wikipedia.org

  GoldenGATE became a semi-automated markup environment for converting legacy taxonomic publications into semantically enriched documents and allowing community involvement in the process.

• Integration with biodiversity data networks

  [1]Plazien.wikipedia.org

  Plazi developed TAPIR, Species Page Model, and Darwin Core Archive-based workflows to make literature-derived distribution records and taxonomic treatments available to systems including GBIF and the Encyclopedia of Life.

• Biodiversity Literature Repository collaboration

  [1]Plazien.wikipedia.org

  Plazi became a cofounder of the Biodiversity Literature Repository and maintained digital taxonomic literature and FAIR-oriented data through a Zenodo-hosted repository.

Open-science and biodiversity-informatics infrastructure provider specializing in the conversion, preservation, semantic enhancement, and dissemination of taxonomic literature and species-level data.

• Taxonomic data service

  TreatmentBank

  TreatmentBank is a Plazi-associated service and data environment for extracting, structuring, enhancing, and distributing taxonomic treatments from scientific literature. Its purpose is to turn descriptions of species and higher taxa into reusable digital information that can be searched, linked, preserved, and supplied to biodiversity-information systems. Treatments may be enhanced with links to external resources such as name registries and sequence databases when those connections are available.

• Open scientific literature repository

  Biodiversity Literature Repository

  The Biodiversity Literature Repository is a digital repository for biodiversity and taxonomic publications and the structured data derived from them. Plazi is identified as a cofounder and maintains taxonomic literature in the Zenodo-hosted repository. The repository supports persistent access and the reuse of FAIR-oriented literature data by researchers, aggregators, and biodiversity-information projects.

• Scientific document markup tool

  GoldenGATE

  GoldenGATE is a complex semi-automated editing and markup tool used to convert taxonomic publications into semantically enhanced documents. It supports the application of XML-based models to legacy literature and allows community participants to contribute to the rendering and enrichment of documents. The resulting structured material can support the extraction of taxonomic treatments and associated biodiversity data.

• Taxonomic XML standards and data conversion

  TaxonX and TaxPub workflows

  TaxonX and TaxPub are XML-oriented approaches used to represent taxonomic literature and treatments in structured form. TaxonX was developed to model biosystematic publications, while TaxPub is used to enhance submitted taxonomic treatments with a standardized XML representation. Together with markup tools and repository workflows, they make scientific descriptions more suitable for computational processing and long-term reuse.

1. 1Plazien.wikipedia.org
2. 2Plazi official websiteplazi.org