Slashdot Mirror

Chuckles08 writes "The Encyclopedia of Life project, an online resource aggregating information about all life on Earth, now has over 1 million taxon pages with content. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons license and includes text, over 1.5 million images, video, and sounds. It's an amazing resource for educators since the information is curated and rated. EOL also develops tools to make the content even more accessible, like the field guide tool that lets you build a customized online (and printable) field guide about any group of species or higher taxa."

Chuckles08 writes "The Encyclopedia of Life project, an online resource aggregating information about all life on Earth, now has over 1 million taxon pages with content. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons license and includes text, over 1.5 million images, video, and sounds. It's an amazing resource for educators since the information is curated and rated. EOL also develops tools to make the content even more accessible, like the field guide tool that lets you build a customized online (and printable) field guide about any group of species or higher taxa."

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.

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."