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Encyclopedia of Life Launches First 30,000 Pages

Posted by kdawson on Wed Feb 27, 2008 05:15 AM
from the sure-is-loud-in-here dept.
Earth Science
An anonymous reader writes to let us know that the Encyclopedia of Life opened up to the public today with its first 30,000 pages in place — and, according to the AP, promptly crumbled even before being Slashdotted. (The site seems fine now.) We discussed this project last year when it was announced. The Telegraph has an overview of the launch, and reports that only 25 "exemplar" pages on the site are fully fleshed out to the extent scientists hope eventually to attain for all species; the other few tens of thousands are expanded placeholders. The project hopes to begin taking input from citizen-scientists late this year.
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[+] Science: Earth's Species To Be Cataloged On the Web 147 comments
Matt clues us in to a project to compile everything known about all of Earth's 1.8 million known species and put it all on one Web site, open to the world. The effort is called the Encyclopedia of Life. It will include species descriptions, pictures, maps, videos, sound, sightings by amateurs, and links to entire genomes and scientific journal papers. The site was unveiled today in Washington where the massive effort was announced by some of the world's leading institutions. The project is expected to take about 10 years to complete; it starts out with committed funding for 1/4 of that."
Submission: Encyclopedia of Life launches first 30,000 pages by Anonymous Coward
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  • 30000 pages... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by joaommp (685612) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @05:22AM (#22571278) Journal
    now that's going to take a long time to fill...

    I can see it now, like in wikipedia... about 1/10 of the articles are stubs... they mark it as stubs and no one ever remembers to fill them. I would fill them, problem is, I only found the stubs because I was actually searching for that information... not because I had it.
    • There are convenient automatically generated pages of lists of stubs.
      Find a stub and look at the categories its in.
      • I love how they cite wikipedia as a source, even though it's an encyclopedia. Didn't they go to elementary school? Also the oblig. eye-roll at the term "electronic article" ~~~~
    • Yeah, I predict it will start filling faster when Spore is released in September.

  • Dupe? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Wolfbone (668810) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @05:26AM (#22571296)
    Not the story - the project. What I mean is: how is this new project related to this one: http://tolweb.org/ [tolweb.org] if at all?

    • Re:Dupe? (Score:5, Informative)

      by banana fiend (611664) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @05:42AM (#22571358)
      They are separate projects, with TOL being less well funded basically, and smaller in scope. I believe that TOL have shared their data with EOL.
    • tolweb seems to have lots of high level categories but no actual species.
    • And what about Wikispecies [wikimedia.org]?
    • From this page here at ToL, you can see that there is a collaboration between efforts as to not overlap in data. It also states that the goals of each are slightly different in that EOL focuses more on specific species, whereas the ToL is more about phylogenetic classifications and evolutionary branches.
      I've been looking into the National Science Foundation's AToL program recently because of an offer for grad school which is due to a grant from that specific program and I'm curious what, if any, connection

      • Re:Dupe? (Score:5, Informative)

        by esocid (946821) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @09:28AM (#22572902) Journal
        Let's try that again with the link this time.
        From this page here [tolweb.org] at ToL, you can see that there is a collaboration between efforts as to not overlap in data. It also states that the goals of each are slightly different in that EOL focuses more on specific species, whereas the ToL is more about phylogenetic classifications and evolutionary branches. I've been looking into the National Science Foundation's AToL program recently because of an offer for grad school which is due to a grant from that specific program and I'm curious what, if any, connection there is between the two.
  • Am I the only one not seeing anything else except for the demo-stuff there from way back? Where are these fabled articles? Link, anyone?

  • ONLY 30000? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by polar red (215081) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @05:30AM (#22571314)
    Only 30000?
    There are Tens of millions of different species on earth - Flowering plants ALONE are numbering 250000!
    there is another similar project called tree of life [tolweb.org]

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by rucs_hack (784150)
      Well, I can cover several tens of millions of those species in one sentence:

      GGCAGGGGTCTATGGTGGCAGGAAGCTTGGCGTGCTAGAGGGTTGTGGTTGGGC

      Specifically, a Core Promoter as shared by almost all Eukaryotes.

      Where each species differs by one or two characters. I guess you could work it out in terms of Hamming Distance..

  • an unfortunate domainname (Score:4, Funny)

    by wereHamster (696088) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @05:52AM (#22571404)
    eol.org, all I can see in it is 'end of life'

  • Download and license (Score:5, Interesting)

    by oever (233119) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @06:03AM (#22571460) Homepage
    So where can we download this data and what is the license?

    The data from tolweb.org are downloadable [tolweb.org] under a Creative Commons license.
  • The "Encyclopedia of Life" went off-line even before it was slashdotted, this must be one of the signs for the end of the world!

  • Great effort (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Psychotria (953670) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @06:34AM (#22571588)
    My love of the "natural" sciences is not something I hide. My respect for E.O.Wilson is also something I do not hide. Wilson frequently mentions his wish for this project to become true, and I can understand his reasons for doing so. Wilson, I admit, is not without critics (but who of us are?). I only mention Wilson because this is a project he has often spoken of. Despite varying opinions on him, he DOES believe in biological information (and, yes, probably data) for the masses. Not to mention that he has a writing style to die for...

    Anyway, back on topic. This project is grand in its scope and bold in its objectives. Whether it fails or succeeds is beside the point really... the project is a challenge to all of science and is quite like open-source software. The more shoulders (of giants) we can sit on, the better the end result will be.

    Great project. Worthwhile project. I take my hat off to all involved. Thank-you.

  • Badly designed... (Score:5, Informative)

    by red star hardkore (1242136) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @06:43AM (#22571638)

    It's slow, only has demonstration pages and is extremely badly designed.

    As somebody has already mentioned, images don't have alt tags, but also there are tables used for layout (with many empty rows/cols for no apparent reason) and there are image maps. The site uses an XHTML doctype, but isn't valid XHTML. There are missing slashes for closing single tags. The divs for the popups are contained outside the body tags, that's NOT ALLOWED!

    That's all I see, what about anybody else?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by sjaguar (763407)
      Yeah, since everything is an image, it is a PITA to copy (quote) text. And, with a 30 second+ load time, it is unusable.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      what do you expect from academia? biologists?

      I mean, there are computer scientists who can't program....

    • Re:Badly designed... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Psychotria (953670) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @07:42AM (#22571914)
      You're correct of course. But look beyond the HTML/XHTML... This project isn't about that, it's about sharing of biological information and data.

      That's all I see, what about anybody else?

      Well, actually, I see much more. I see a project that seeks to gather every single scrap of data or information about every single taxon on Earth; a database of LIFE, of everything that we know about organisms that share this planet with us. At this point I can gloss over the malformed pages etc etc... that will sort itself out in time. The important thing is that the information and data is available.

      • Re:Badly designed... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by juhaz (110830) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @08:02AM (#22572016) Homepage

        You're correct of course. But look beyond the HTML/XHTML... This project isn't about that, it's about sharing of biological information and data.
        If someone criticized building a skyscraper on mud would you dismiss them as irrelevant and tell it isn't about that, it's about building the tallest building in the world?

        You can't "look beyond" the foundations of something. The data is useless if it's so bad it can't be easily worked on, and the information might as well not exist if it's hidden in the bad data.
        • The data is useless if it's so bad it can't be easily worked on, and the information might as well not exist if it's hidden in the bad data.

          The data is there. You can interpret and present that data (as information) any way you like. The fact that the data is being presented (as information) with silly HTML/XHTML or whatever is irrelevant. The data is not bad. The information might be... (I personally don't think it is, but I'm just going along with what you said). The data is solid, how that data is pre
      • I see a whole bunch of potentially useful, detailed and potentially accurate information that won't show up in a Google or Yahoo! search because it's images. I also eventually see that when it is somehow indexed, and if it's #1 on the list and Wikipedia is #2, I see people choosing Wikipedia because it's *more useable*.

        I'm guessing that because of university connect speeds, the time it takes to load a 1 meg page isn't significant. Meanwhile, none of the kids with OLPCs will be using the site.

        Poor execution

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Stooshie (993666)
      If you look at the site they are currently looking for programmers to work with them.
    • Also, it would be nice if the page width adjusted to the browser width instead of forcing you to use full screen on a 1280x1024 monitor. Since I don't normally browse in full-screen mode, for me it's endless horizontal scrolling. I can't imagine using this on a regular basis. Maybe they should just copy Wikipedia's template - which has been fine-tuned over time for user experience - instead of trying to re-invent the wheel.

    • It's slow, only has demonstration pages and is extremely badly designed.

      As somebody has already mentioned, images don't have alt tags, but also there are tables used for layout (with many empty rows/cols for no apparent reason) and there are image maps. The site uses an XHTML doctype, but isn't valid XHTML. There are missing slashes for closing single tags. The divs for the popups are contained outside the body tags, that's NOT ALLOWED!

      That's all I see, what about anybody else?

      I see a poster that needs to go into quirks mode?

    • Roderic Page, who is involved in the Encyclopedia of Life "in an advisory capacity," has posted some fairly damning criticisms [blogspot.com] of the project in its current form. I have not spent much time poking around the site myself, but if what he says is true then it sounds like he's pretty right on. (Example: Some pages actually devote more on-screen space to contributor/sponsor logos than to content.) Here's hoping they're already taking steps to improve it.
  • eol == end of life

    It seems they have the end of their project in sight :)

  • oh, flash-tastic! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dwater (72834) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @07:48AM (#22571942)
    More flash crap.

    "Oh good, the page has finished loading. Bollocks, there's still some flash left to load."

    Will we ever be free of this crap?
    It's made a sort of 'two-stage' internet - load the html, then load the flash baggage.

  • citizen-scientists? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sm62704 (957197) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @08:44AM (#22572352) Journal
    WTF is a "citizen-scientist"? Isn't this encyclopedia on the internet? Then what country are these citizen-scientists citizens of? Aren't all scientists citizens of some country or another?

    Do you mean amateur scientists? Some people refuse to call a spade a spade, referring to it as a "pointy shovel", but you're calling it a "bonk-digger".
      • Moral duties including, it is to be supposed, contributing to the spread of knowledge and the enlightment of your fellow citizens.

        Seems to me that any scientist who wasn't like that would be a very poor scientist.
  • From the AP "The most popular of the species for Web searches is the poisonous death cap mushroom, which may say something about people's homicidal intentions, joked Ausubel."

    I think Mr. Ausubel underestimates the popularity of shroomz.

    • Re:Wikipedia, anyone? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Rakshasa Taisab (244699) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @06:03AM (#22571462) Homepage

      Wouldn't it be better if citizen-scientists concentrated in improving and expanding wikipedia articles on animals?
      Because the elephant population has, in fact, _NOT_ tripled the past few years.
      • Actually, the Wikipedia entry for "elephant" [wikipedia.org] is a good example of the great work already done. Anyway.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by owlnation (858981)

        Because the elephant population has, in fact, _NOT_ tripled the past few years.

        Exactly, and in all seriousness there is so much sleaze, agenda-ism, corruption and mismanagement in Wikipedia (already well documented, and proven here), that it is far better to start a new project that has a chance of not making the same mistakes. One that has a chance of maintaining a good reputation and high standards, something Wikipedia has completely failed to do.

        This project sounds like a great idea -- and if noth

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          sleaze, agenda-ism, corruption and mismanagement in Wikipedia (already well documented, and proven here), that it is far better to start a new project that has a chance of not making the same mistakes.
          Those are the hallmarks of people. So where are you planning on finding the aliens or AIs to run your new fairy tale project, because that would be only way to start one that will not make them? (not just _chance_, mind you, it's inevitable)
      • It was on the news recently that they were shooting elephants because their population has grown from 8000 to 20.000 and they have become a nuisance.

        Animal rights activists that shooting them is stupid as that supposedly makes them breed faster?

    • Re:Elitest Wikipedia? (Score:4, Informative)

      by wonnage (1206966) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @06:36AM (#22571604)
      Way to beat on that straw-man... Besides, if you bothered to read the article: "There are also tens of thousands of additional species pages not authenticated by scientists but still containing a wealth of information. Later this year the public will be able to contribute text, videos, images, and other information about a species and the best of it will be incorporated into the authenticated pages." By the way, it's spelled "elitist".

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