Plazi Verein is an international association devoted to the development and promotion of open and persistent access to the data and literature describing species. To this end we have developed an xml schema, TaxonX (http://plazi.org/?q=node/10), for the markup of species descriptions to make the rich data in them accessible for analysis, retrieval, and data mining. We have also developed an application, GoldenGate (http://plazi.org/?q=GoldenGATE) which employs the GATE framework which serves as an "Annotation Editor" and applies NLP techniques to enable semi-automated markup of the data of interest in textual data.