The Encyclopedia of Life
Posted on May 9, 2007
An ambitious project called the Encyclopedia of Life, located at www.eol.org, aims to provide information about all life on Earth. The BBC reports that all life forms from aardvark to zorilla will be included. The goal of the project is to detail all 1.8 million planet and animal species in a massive database.
The Encyclopedia of Life project aims to detail all 1.8 million known plant and animal species in a net archive.Here is a video for the Encyclopedia of Life.Individual species pages will include photographs, video, sound and maps, collected and written by experts.
The archive, to be built over 10 years, could help conservation efforts as well as being a useful tool for education.
"The Encyclopedia of Life will provide valuable biodiversity and conservation information to anyone, anywhere, at any time," said Dr James Edwards, executive director of the $100m (£50m) project.
"[It] will ultimately make high-quality, well-organized information available on an unprecedented level."
The vast database will initially concentrate on animals, plants and fungi with microbes to follow. Fossil species may eventually be added.
The EOL database has been ongoing since 2006. The project was initially hosted at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Another project attempting to record information about species is called the Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD).