The Complete electronic Encyclopedia of Life
Scientists have created an Encyclopedia of Life – a database that will contain information about all kinds of plants, animals, fungi and bacteria that live or have lived on Earth. The project will be officially presented to the public on Thursday, writes The New York Times (The Encyclopedia of Life, No Bookshelf Required, 02/26/2008).
The mastermind of the comprehensive Internet project was a biologist from Harvard University, Edward O. Wilson. He and his colleagues announced the creation of a database of all living beings in May last year. On Thursday, Wilson will present the first 30,000 pages containing information about 30,000 species. In the next ten years, more than 1.5 million pages should appear in the Encyclopedia of Life.
The first 30 thousand pages contain brief information mainly about fish, amphibians and plants. In order for readers to assess the amount of information about each type, the authors of the project will present 24 reference pages. In particular, full articles about the pale toadstool, peregrine falcon, tomato and potato are already ready.
Specially developed algorithms select the necessary information from numerous network databases, scientific articles and other sources of information, process them and bring them to a standard form. In the future, the authors plan to include in the Encyclopedia all possible information about each species: photographs, DNA sequence, evolutionary trees, and even song recordings for pages about birds.
The creators of the Encyclopedia of Life tried to make it convenient for both specialists and ordinary users. A special button allows you to set the required level of detail of the presentation.
The authors of the project invite specialists in various fields to cooperate. In addition, everyone can help the project by sending interesting materials. That is, the replenishment of the Encyclopedia of Life will be carried out partly on the principle of Wikipedia.
The Encyclopedia of Life is not the first attempt to create a database of this kind. All previous projects failed. Edward Wilson took part in several unsuccessful attempts and believes that the Encyclopedia of Life has every chance of survival. Wilson hopes for modern information retrieval technologies and numerous scientific databases that allow you to learn almost anything.
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27.02.2008