Creation goes online
(March 3rd 2008) "The Encyclopedia of Life" (EOL) is an ambitious project that aims to catalogue all living creatures on the world wide web. Melanie Estrella sneaks a first glimpse at this database of biodiversity and assesses its chances of becoming a virtual blockbuster.
About 1.8 million species populate the planet - or perhaps there are many more, no one is really sure. Never mind, EOL is here to help by gathering together all the information currently available on Earth's known inhabitants, then making it available at one site freely accessible to everyone, instead of forgetting about it in piles on dusty library shelves scattered around the world. Nevertheless, the idea isn't entirely brand new. The virtual world has already seen several attempts at establishing databases describing the globe's lifeforms and, so far, they haven't been crowned with much success. Will EOL make a difference?
This new species' databank is intended to be useful for both scientists, allowing them to broaden their analyses, and for common people, looking to satisfy their inquisitiveness, or to prepare school reports, or even just to sneak a preview of their holiday flora and fauna.
The initial far-from-final version of EOL, launched on February 26th (
www.eol.org), offers 30,000 sites attributed to one species each. Currently, the interactive zoo and botanical garden presents mainly fish, amphibians, and plants, with some large mammals and birds thrown in. While 25 'exemplar' pages show how much information can potentially be provided, tens of thousands of pages only contain minimal information and about one million more pages serve merely as templates for future information insertion. The site's authors, an international team of scientists, predict the data will be completed within the next decade.
Scientific and academic facilities can provide habitat maps, DNA sequences, audio and video files, photographs, evolutionary trees, but contributions to this web catalogue are not limited to scientists since everybody is invited to donate material, for example, snapshots from the last safari trip. However, unlike the content of Wikipedia, all added material needs to be authorized by a scientific committee before appearing online.
The mainspring for this concerted itemizing of animated nature is Edward Wilson, a professor emeritus in biology at Harvard University and an ant expert. "The encyclopedia of life aims not only to summarize all that we know of Earth's life forms, but also to accelerate the discovery of the vast array that remain unknown", Wilson explains. "This great effort promises to lay out new directions for research in every branch of biology."
Wilson and his colleagues successfully persuaded several generous sponsors to support the online compilation of the world's life, among them the John D. and Cathrine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. $50 million are available over five years for the participating consortium of universities, museums and scientific institutions.
Inspite of this, not all taxonomic biologists were completely thrilled at the first sight of the encyclopedia. Roderic Page, Professor of Taxonomy at the University of Glasgow and one of the encyclopedia's advisors, wrote in a blog on "iPhylo" that he was disappointed the database did not hold at least as much information as Wikipedia or the species specific database "iSpecies". Page criticized the authorization process claiming that it will cripple the potency of the new database. Similarly, science writer Carl Zimmer, in his blog "The Loom", asked "Who is going to approve the plethora of material that will be turned in, especially given the sparse number of taxonomists?"
Whether EOL will reach its final goal and turn into a comprehensive, intensively used species databank remains to be seen, although the progress being made in database design may lead to success. At least as measured by public interest, the web site started off as a hit: On the morning of release, millions of EOL visitors caused an interim system break down and a switch back to the demo version.
