Managing and Organizing Plant Identification Keys for Easy Retrieval

Most biologists keep data in separate databases created themselves. These databases are not well-structured. Plant identification keys are among such data. They are used to identify various plant species. The way the data is kept often requires the species identification to be done linearly. Done manual, this is very time consuming.

Information extraction (IE) is a process of selecting information such as names, terms, or phrases, from a natural language text documents. This information is then structured into a specified template for easy retrieval. This method is applied to plant identification keys kept by the biologists. We illustrate the processes using an example from a database and discuss ways to reorganize the identification keys.