Thursday, May 10, 2007

Encyclopedia of Life

Having an Encyclopedia of Life webpage is a really good idea!
People all over the world (e.g. scientists, professors, school teachers, students, or people with too much time to spent) can benefit from this.

I just check out the www.eol.org site, but there is nothing yet. It only has a few demonstration pages.

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Leading Scientists Announce Creation Of Encyclopedia Of Life (partial article)

Science Daily — Realizing a dream articulated in 2003 by renowned biologist E.O. Wilson, Harvard and four partner institutions have launched an ambitious effort to create an Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), an unprecedented project to document online every one of Earth's 1.8 million known species. For the first time in history, the EOL would grant scientists, students, and others multimedia access to all known living species, even those just discovered.

The effort, announced May 9, will be supported by a new $10 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and $2.5 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

With a Wikipedia-style Web page detailing each organism's genome, geographic distribution, phylogenetic position, habitat, and ecological relationships, organizers hope the EOL will ultimately serve as a global beacon for biodiversity and conservation.

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For more than 250 years, scientists have catalogued life, but traditional catalogues have long since become unwieldy, EOL organizers say. They believe technology can help science grasp the immense complexity of life on this planet while protecting Earth's biodiversity and better conserving our natural heritage.

Over the next 10 years, the EOL will create Web pages for all 1.8 million living species known to exist on Earth. The pages, housed at http://www.eol.org, will provide written information and, when available, photographs, video, sound, location maps, and other multimedia information on each species. Built on the scientific integrity of thousands of experts around the globe, the EOL will be a moderated Wikipedia-like resource, freely available to all users everywhere.

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Full article
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