Semiautomatic Extraction of Morphological Characters from a Book about Insect Vectors of Chagas Disease

Abstract

For centuries biologists and naturalists have published, morphological information of animals and plants in printed media such as books and journals. However, only a small fraction of that information is easily available and formatted to conduct further phylogenetic analysis. It is necessary to develop software tools to extract, integrate and publish this information. In this work, we have developed a process to a) obtain species descriptions in separated documents from a book about Chagas disease vectors (Triatomine kissing bugs) and b) extract morphological characters of Triatominae species. 131 documents from different species and their characteristics and values have been obtained to build a pedagogical tool. These obtained data will also be used to infer phylogenies of this important group of disease vector. In the future, we will expect to extent our approach to extract morphological data of any group of biological organisms. This work is an application of TICs for education.