Thursday, Mar 27, 2008
On February 26th, the first 30,000 pages of a new online Encyclopedia of Life were revealed at the Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference in Monterey, California, where the project was begun last year.
The 30,000 species in the first version come mainly from databases of fish, amphibians and plants. Experts also created 24 detailed “exemplar” pages, to show just how much information the encyclopedia can handle. Those pages include well-studied species like the yellow fever mosquito, the eastern white pine and the death-cap mushroom.
Feedback on these first pages will shape the ultimate design and functionality of all of the pages of the encyclopedia, scheduled for completion by 2017. It will also help inform priorities for content development.
The free, online, collaborative encyclopedia will eventually document all of the 1.8 million species of living organisms currently known to science. The encyclopedia is being complied from existing databases and from contributions by experts and non-experts from around the world.
On its home page, the Encyclopedia of Life describes itself and its goals thusly:
Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about all life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goals are to:
- Create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike.
- Transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating virtually all known data about every living species.
- Engage a wide audience of schoolchildren, educators, citizen scientists, academics and those who are just curious about Earth's species.
- Increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.
The link below will take you to the encyclopedia.
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