The Plazi TreatmentBank deals with scientific, published, biosystematic literature. It is the literature documenting and describing all the world’s ca 1.9 Million known species in an estimated corpus of over 500 Million published pages. The cited publications in Plazi are all available at the Biodiversity Literature Repository at Zenodo/CERN.
Treatments are well defined parts of articles that define the particular usage of a scientific name by an author at a given time (the publication). With other words, each scientific name has one to several treatments, depending on whether there exists only an original description of a species, or whether there are subsequent re-descriptions. Similar to bibliographic references, treatments can be cited, and subsequent usages of names cite earlier treatments.
Treatments are a synthesis of the knowledge about a given species at a given time. They can be very rich in data, explicitly or implicitly, detailed or summarized, and include many references to external data sources, such as scientific names, collection codes, DNA-codes. The data can be semantically enhanced, and linked.
