Thanks very much, rozz, for your kind words about the ToL.
My hope is that EOL will get their act together, and I am helping out as I can. Whether their bureaucracy will allow them to do great things is not yet clear. I worry sometimes that they would be more successful with $1M than $25M+. Sometimes lots of money has a tendency to create more infrastructure than structure. (The ToL's total budget for the entire first 5 years was $16,000. During that time my brother and I were the programmers, and we had a single graduate student assistant, and that was it. At most we have had two full-time employees, which is what we have now. Most of the work, after all, is done by the biologists out there.)
The goals and much of the structure of the Tree of Life Web Project (http://tolweb.org) were exactly the same as the EOL. It isn't intended to be smaller in scope, and it also contains a large number of species pages. The core content of both projects is contributed by the community of experts on each group of organism; it is thus hierarchically-coordinated (to match the shape of the Tree). There are many other similarities. In fact, as the EOL was first being proposed, the community of systematic biologists was concerned about the obvious duplication. The major differences are age (the ToL started in 1995) and resources (the EOL has vastly more funds and buy-in by many corporations/foundations outside of academia). And with the millions of dollars the EOL now has, they are planning additional content the ToL could have only dreamed of.
Because they share the same basic goals, I'm enthusiastic about the EOL, and the community of biologists who are behind the ToL (including me) have agreed to redefine the scope of the ToL to primarily focus on information about groups of species, rather than individual species; the ToL will display species pages, but the primary effort to create the content for species will be via the EOL. The EOL, in turn, has agreed to focus on species, and will harvest information from the ToL and other sites about groups of species. So the bottom line is: the two projects were effectively identical in goals, but have been redefined to be complementary.
(I'm coordinator/editor/founder of the Tree of Life Web Project.)
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Thanks very much, rozz, for your kind words about the ToL.
My hope is that EOL will get their act together, and I am helping out as I can. Whether their bureaucracy will allow them to do great things is not yet clear. I worry sometimes that they would be more successful with $1M than $25M+. Sometimes lots of money has a tendency to create more infrastructure than structure. (The ToL's total budget for the entire first 5 years was $16,000. During that time my brother and I were the programmers, and we had a single graduate student assistant, and that was it. At most we have had two full-time employees, which is what we have now. Most of the work, after all, is done by the biologists out there.)
The goals and much of the structure of the Tree of Life Web Project (http://tolweb.org) were exactly the same as the EOL. It isn't intended to be smaller in scope, and it also contains a large number of species pages. The core content of both projects is contributed by the community of experts on each group of organism; it is thus hierarchically-coordinated (to match the shape of the Tree). There are many other similarities. In fact, as the EOL was first being proposed, the community of systematic biologists was concerned about the obvious duplication. The major differences are age (the ToL started in 1995) and resources (the EOL has vastly more funds and buy-in by many corporations/foundations outside of academia). And with the millions of dollars the EOL now has, they are planning additional content the ToL could have only dreamed of.
Because they share the same basic goals, I'm enthusiastic about the EOL, and the community of biologists who are behind the ToL (including me) have agreed to redefine the scope of the ToL to primarily focus on information about groups of species, rather than individual species; the ToL will display species pages, but the primary effort to create the content for species will be via the EOL. The EOL, in turn, has agreed to focus on species, and will harvest information from the ToL and other sites about groups of species. So the bottom line is: the two projects were effectively identical in goals, but have been redefined to be complementary.
(I'm coordinator/editor/founder of the Tree of Life Web Project.)