A Wikipedia-Style Tree of Life Emerges

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 20, 2015 @07:04AM from the 'tis-but-a-seed dept.

The Christian Science Monitor reports on the newly announced Open Tree of Life, a freely accessible unified interface to, and archive, of biological taxonomies. In the current version, data from nearly 500 evolutionary timelines has been assembled into a single, searchable view of all known life forms; From the CSM report: Building the computer code and compiling the data took three years, and involved collaborators from Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, the Web development firm Interrobang, the University of Michigan, the University of Florida, Duke University, and George Washington University. "Many participants on the project contributed hundreds of hours tracking down and cleaning up thousands of trees from the literature, then selecting 484 of them that were used to generate the draft tree of life," said Cody Hinchliff, a scientist from the University of Idaho, in the announcement.

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Almost Cool by JMJimmy · 2015-09-20 07:44 · Score: 3, Interesting

It'd be cooler if it was general public friendly. Scientists might find it useful but the general public will have no use for something they can't understand. Really though it seems like they're just copying others databases (primarily NCBI and SILVA) which have "trees" of their own.