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Earth's Species To Be Cataloged On the Web
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."
Wikimedia Foundation already has a project called WikiSpecies -- http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page . Not sure how different that project will be.
It seems that many species would be extinct by the time they finish this in 10 years. Why not just make it a wiki and then it could be completed in a fraction of the time and perhaps not as many species would be extinct by the time their entry is completed. Or just find a way to do it faster without compromising the integrity of the entries
It seems like a good idea overall, I hope the funding continues.
Mostly Harmless
Maybe if this sig is witty or clever enough, someone will love me...
Wikipedia is great and all, but its stated intent to not validate its data (unlike Citizendium, for example) means it has a limited usefulness.
These Internet pages, are they something I'd need an Internet browser to enjoy?
I always mod up spelling trolls.
the tree of life project: http://tolweb.org/tree/phylogeny.html
How long until some nerd stops writing the URL at the eol?
From the article
I suppose anyone could try and duplicate any current effort, like a search engine, browser, video site, political site, movie site, music site, and then hope that with enough money and lawyers behind it to gain a large portion of the market.
This page will need a beowolf cluster of web servers! It has a single huge image as the front page.
....
Ah well, it won't stay up for long
"Cats like plain crisps"
We can't keep up!
Call me when they have added Big Foot footage. Until then watching Bush on TV will be enough zoo time for me.
It's always great to see iniciatives like this one.
I think that this one could be a lot better because of the people and partners who are involved.
Anyways there are always room for good pages like these two, so now we only have to collaborate and spread the word.
With that massive jpg on the site, it won't be long until the site becomes extinct.
:(){
Oy. I guess I can see some kind of value to the project, but the notion of species that we get/got in HS is not very closely related to the ones folks currently work with. I suspect that, at best, this will "be a vital tool for ... [grade school] educators [and desperate students] across the globe."
It looks like smart folks are behind this, but it is strongly reminiscent of Gore's proposal to have NASA prioritize the project of making live satellite photos of the planet available 24/7. Sure, it'd be cool, but...
Discoverlife.org has been doing something very similar for several years and claim to have cataloged over a million species.
I had a look at a couple of the page mock-ups on the site. The information seems organized in a much better way than on the Wiki-species page. If the actual site turns out to be as good as the examples I will use it frequently.
:(){
I'm going to list my sightings of, let's see, that's an Indian Mynah Acridotheres tristis, and a household rat rattus rattus. Oh, and there's a dog next door, and we have a cat.
Here's to participating in important research!
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
I wonder if creationists in the future might later claim that the website didn't take 10 years to compile, but was created in a day...
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
And for the web 2.0 version, I'll make a mash-up between that and hotornot.com where the user can rate the animal on perceived taste from "Yuck" to "Let's farm these suckers" to "Will all be eaten before domestication".
EvilCON - Made Famous by
This reminds me of projects I would have my peons complete in games like Civilization, Galactic Civiliations, Warcraft etc. It is being built to amaze the masses and focus our attention to the wonders of the internet. Once it is built it will give society a "bonus", but that bonus will be short lived. In 10 years who knows if we will even use the internet? In 10 years we could all be connected in a mesh wireless network, receiving public domain info as fast as we needed it.
One certainly doesn't need a tool like this now unless that person works for an institution (like the CDC) that will probably have a better database than the web one. But it is cool.
A few years ago, when I was babysitting the neighbor's kid, I spotted an odd grashopper in the street. It was larger than any of the species I've seen up here before (Pacific Northwest), nearly four inches long, and mottled grey in a way that matched the asphalt pretty closely, with bright blue on its hind legs. It stayed very still for the most part, but occasionally walked a few inches before stopping again (I'm talking over a span of a few hours). Getting closer revealed that it looked like it was sucking on the road itself (or maybe some of the lichens within? I dunno). Now I spent much of my childhood chasing and catching grasshoppers in this same area, so this quite fascinated me and I wondered if there wasn't some urban offshoot of Orthoptera I hadn't previously known about. I let the bug be, but resolved to scour the web for information on it. Unfortunately, there was nothing to be found. No matching descriptions, and certainly no pictures. It didn't occur to me until much later that it may have been an as yet undocumented species.
This is all to say, it is about damn time we had something like the Encyclopedia of Life. Wikis are great to a certain point, but an organized project with funding, set on being as comprehensive as possible? Sign. me. up.
I just had my first "damn I wish they had this when I was in grade school" moment. Next there will be a you spoiled kids don't know how to work for your knowlege moment.
And then 50 years down the line, Encyclopedists will be removed in a bloodless coup and we'll all be told that the Encyclopedia project has always been a fraud. Now where the bleep is this Star's end?
All your genomes are belong to us...
Let me get this straight. They are going to document Earth species on... wait for it... the Earth?
It would add tremendously to its usefulness if they could include high quality pictures of the specimens in the great museum collections. Especially for stuff like birds, butterflies, beetles where there's a lot of diversity and variations. There's no mention of this being done in the EOL FAQ. I'm aware that it take plenty more resources to do this but it will be worthwhile. There's still new discoveries hidden in those vast museum collections.
Anybody who's ever worked in sales or IT is going to be understandably agitated by their choice of acronym for the project, especially considering the subject matter at hand.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I wouldn't be surprised if Google got behind the funding and made it super-searchable... :)
2 bears and a gazelle please, standard shipping though, I'm not in a rush.
I hope they don't forget to include a field describing how delicious each life-form is (and perhaps how it is best served).
Yes, you may only read these pages while connected to the internet.
Other examples:
Single player games that require an internet connection to install or run. (Value Steam)
Operating systems that require an internet connection to activate or validate genuineness. (Microsoft Windows)
Music that requires an internet connection before authorizing a computer, up to 5 limit. (Apple Itunes)
Like Eddie Vedder would say: "It's Evolution BABY!!!"
Darwin would be proud
A database that will get smaller over time instead of always growing out of it's disk space! Do your part to help by killing everything you don't recognize as a member of your family.
-- ydra
Very cool.
(simple)
.. and send the pic to the biology dept of your local university. They'll probably be happy to identify the species for you - especially if you tell them you've looked around but couldn't identify it.
(Oh - and a large, unknown-until-now species of grasshoppers in the Pacific Northwest doesn't sound very probable. But hey - you never know!!)
Stop the brainwash
Wikipedia foundation is a sponsor, of sorts, so hopefully EOL will benefit from the association, but I see this as a kind of showdown between the power of benign anarachy vs traditional academic processes. I this EOL will struggle to do a well as Wikipedia, but I'm pretty biased.
In any case, it's a noble (if not Nobel) ambition.
Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people!
And the grandparent wasn't a WikiTroll? I had mod-points but decided to post instead of moderate.
/., echo away.
Do people really believe that "anybody can edit" and "accurate information suitable for reference" are one and the same?
Look at the question the grandparent asked -- it exposes a hidden assumption that liberal editing and accuracy are identical.
Citizendium still allows liberal editing, but on top of it they have a peer-review system in place to approve snapshots of articles. They aren't mutually exclusive. However, Wikipedia has a policy of not having any process to gain any modicum of authority.
Citizendium has its issues too, like that it hasn't fully articulated its desire to have authoritative processes in concrete terms that aren't couched in Larry Sanger's own degree-oriented biases, but at least it's trying.
My whole point was that the Encyclopedia of Life has a reason of existence outside of the no-holds-barred lack of authority that Wikipedia provides.
References and Echo Chambers are entirely two different things.
For making that distinction, I'm modded as a troll. Whatever.
Just wait until Nintendo sues for Copyright Infringement on their own efforts in
An Encyclopedia, cataloging all known species of life - The PokéDex.
Yes, I went there.
I've described new species and worked in systematics for around the past 10 years. Of course by "all" them mean 'vertebrates', 'flowering plants' and some 'fish'. This sounds *a lot* like passed failed attempts, including the ill-fated All-Species project that was to be funded by .com millions. What most people don't realize is that many, perhaps most, of those 1.8 million species have terrible descriptions that may be hundreds of years old, and are basically represented by a name alone. While vertebrate taxonomy may be in the position to build comprehensive species pages that might be useful in this context, the real diversity lies in elsewhere (insects, bacteria, etc.), and remains for all intents and purposes undescribed (based on estimated total species). Look closely, this effort will be data-base related, and will try to federate already populated lists of names, and simply gathered data (i.e. stuff that won't be of any use to the practicing scientist). It will be woefully underfunded, and very little money will make its way to the people who can make a difference- practicing taxonomists. Want to make a difference with respect to biodiversity? Fund the people on the ground (and institutions, i.e. research collections) doing the work of describing what is new.
Should've used a boat instead.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I predict many will taste like chicken (including us). :-P
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
E. O. Wilson got the TED 2007 prize for this purpose.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/83
There is a far greater need for this kind of project that you realize. Very few people are familiar with even a small number of species that they can identify and distinguish from others. For many species the amount of information available is vast and spread over the globe so that for most species, only the "tip of the iceberg" appears on the internet or even in many monographs. Perhaps most importantly, we as humans depend on these myriads of species for our very survival, often without even realizing it (eg. Have you taken a breath today? If so, could you name and identify the species that provided it to you? What can you tell us about whether these species will survive climate change or other human induced disturbances?) With a rapidly (catastrophically) changing world, our very survival will depending on a clear understanding of how these species are interacting, how they will adapt or fail to adapt to human-induced global changes, such as climate change, habitat destruction, loss due to competition from invasive species, etc.
Because in the past the natural world was vast and largely undisturbed, it acted as a buffer that insulated us from the kinds of changes in biodiversity we will see in the future. We have in many ways already spent this patrimony and our future as a species is now far less certain. We tend to underestimate the damage that billions of humans operating mostly in total ignorance have on the subtle creations and interactions that it has taken 2.5 billion years of earth history to produce. We are talking about myriads of interactions that without the some type of electronic network, we have no hope of understanding in the time frames necessary to make fundamental decisions about future human welfare. Whether the network is wireless or still largely nailed to the www 10 years into the future is hardly material compared to the question of whether or not we will be able to put this information grid in place in time for it to make a difference for humanity's future.
My concern (as a practicing fish taxonomist) is whether the task of constructing the "database" may, like so many of these kinds of projects before, dry up or divert resources critically needed for experts to simply learn how to identify many of the organisms and properly name them. Organisms don't come with ID tags and while one can use "molecular markers", one has to establish a map between the markers and the whole organisms being identified. A molecular marker, will not create an isomorphism between usage of a name in the previous literature, without the ability to assess the validity of the identification at each step used. This requires expert identification. This problem is compounded by the fact that most organisms actually have had multiple names that have been inconsistently used to discuss varying aspects of their biology. Sadly, the human expertise needed to make identifications is very small. The problem is not that one can not make an ID. The problem is establishing a scientific basis to know whether the ID is accurate and then consistently applying it as one interprets previous usage of names. At each stage of the compilation process the ID's have to correspond or one is doing little more than creating a giant "mash" in which multiple species are being confused, with respect to this or that bit of information. A project such as this tends to gloss over the practical difficulties by indicating that it will be "working with the experts", without precisely saying how.
A critical element is how will such experts be supported going forward so that they can afford to participate in a meaningful, sustainable way. Sadly, big projects have a way of diverting critical resources toward on-line compilations that are often impressive to the layperson, but full of inaccuracies that are apparent only to an expert. Its not clear what institutional mechanisms are in place for some form of distributed, "self-correction" or who will decide what and how editorial (taxonomic?) decisions will ultimately
In regards to national security, there are several plants that may fall under the purview of several federal agencies (ATF, Office of Homeland Security, etc.) This plants may include cannabis sativa/indica, poppy, castor beans. I'm not convinced the group building this database will defy their politcial masters in Washington, D.C. But maybe they will surprise me.
Who else here thought of the Foundation Series, and the Encyclopaedia Galactica when you read this?
At present extinction rates, the longer you delay, the less work you'll need to do. I wish I had a job like that!
Will it have a "fight" option so i can see which species is strongest? also, will extinct species be featured? (yeah, could probably find out on the projects site.. but someone slashdotted it :P)
Perhaps we'll discover intelligent life on earth at long last.
Why, yes! I AM new here.
There is an entry for FireFox.. that Red Orange plumed animal that is famouss for its nightly browsings and daylight spankng of IE
My Blog | Badsh
I wonder why the image on the front page of eol.org has been centered over Pakistan.
How ironic that the "Encylopedia of Life" have chosen the acronym for "End of Life" as the URL!
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
If anything else, Wikipedia's way of doing things has also proved a couple of things :
...BUT...
- YES, you can find trolls, vandals, spammers and such
- Liberal editing gives better growing speed. Wikipedia has grown much more faster than any other work that requires reviewing.
- Liberal editing is much better for very small and rare subjects that *almost* nobody care about. In organised work, there aren't enough ressource to distribute to those subject and they are left un addressed. In liberal editing regimes, there always be an - albeit small - community of dedicated people who'll write on the rarest subjects. Granted : There is less guarantee about the accuracy without peer review, but at least it's a good starting point.
So there is a place for both EOL (for providing "official" reviewed information) and for WikiMedia's species (where you'll still find information about some obscure bug that almost nobody cares about - but all the 4 labs in the world that intensively study it have written an article about).
Just like there's a place for both traditionnal encyclopedia and wikipedia.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Take a good picture and post the bug image to BugGuide!
Name all of the animals. Given to Adam and Eve in the garden. Maybe we'll get step two when this is finished.
I bet they spend atleast 9 years covering only aforementioned species. Then they will add a link to Google maps, Flikr, and Youtube.
It'll be interesting to read the entry under "Women". Does anyone really understand anything about them?
Ten years is just about enough time to finish it before they'll need to spin up a 1.1 effort to go back and start editing the species as Global Warming kills 'em off!
Does this mean that a cure has been found for human genetics.
The purpose of existence is to make money.
The aims of ARKive were not dissimilar, but this now seems to have transmuted into a lightweight picture and sound library when they realised what they had bitten off. I wish the project well, but can't help thinking that the notion of a one-stop-shop for any huge subject online is fundamentally flawed (except for the ability to reap funding benefits). There are so many interpretations of what is valuable information that to list it all becomes unusable.
Cuz the world is rapidly running out.
Which also means we're next.
you had me at #!
Discoverlife.org runs on solaris 10, the pages, global mapper, and idnature guides are all coded in perl and use image magick. Backend databases were all berekley db but that may change due to current berekley db status. Sadly the people involved with the new effort are not keen on using the existing efforts out there but that is ok. As a previous poster said "may the best survive". Each of these sites has its own niche.
Hey, it's not like the photographer has to identify the animal. And besides, people who aren't scientists can take decent pictures of pigeons, of frogs, or of squirrels; there are various forums for positively identifying plants and animals, and there's no good reason to restrict media sources to experts.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Will slashdotters be in there as geek species?
I found a huge bug in my kitchen last fall; I took a picture and mailed it to my local university's entomology professor, who was kind enough to identify it.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I've looked over the post you replied to and your post and I can't see where any "validation" is happening, nor can I find a use of "~a -> b". I'll try to gleam something out of this post though, but they might be straw arguments since you didn't actually make a complete argument for me to work from.
Proving that something is not valid is actually quite easy since there are only a few ways to make something valid. An exhaustive search of valid methods is pretty trivial.
Plus, "Wikipedia being *not* useful for reference citations", therefore "other things are useful" is not the argument, it's in fact this:
(hidden assumption: "reference citations must be from places that have a validation process to be useful")
"Wikipedia is not useful for reference citations", because "Wikipedia has no validation process".
"Wikipedia is not useful for reference citations", so "it's not identical to something that is useful for reference citations."
And a separate point:
"Other things are useful for reference citations", because "they have a validation process".
Try disagreeing with those logical methods and the assumption, not something you just made up because you couldn't follow the argument.
...all your animals are belong to us.
I hope there's not too much duplication with the Tree of Life.
Nope, just stick your ear at the end of the tubes and listen.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
If there is intelligent, hostile alien life out there, then this is just a catalog of the things to pillage.
A preliminary mockup of the effort can be found here.
It is only a matter of time before Bruce Campbell ends up being listed as the ultimate form of life on Earth. You know the game God of War was based on his biography.a mpbell&diff=129334775&oldid=129327975
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bruce_C