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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
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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
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.
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.
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 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".
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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.
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... :)
I hope they don't forget to include a field describing how delicious each life-form is (and perhaps how it is best served).
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
.. 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
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.
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.
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
Perhaps we'll discover intelligent life on earth at long last.
Why, yes! I AM new here.
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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.
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