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Encyclopedia of Life Launches First 30,000 Pages
Posted by
kdawson
on Wednesday February 27, @05:15AM
from the sure-is-loud-in-here dept.
from the sure-is-loud-in-here dept.
An anonymous reader writes to let us know that the Encyclopedia of Life opened up to the public today with its first 30,000 pages in place — and, according to the AP, promptly crumbled even before being Slashdotted. (The site seems fine now.) We discussed this project last year when it was announced. The Telegraph has an overview of the launch, and reports that only 25 "exemplar" pages on the site are fully fleshed out to the extent scientists hope eventually to attain for all species; the other few tens of thousands are expanded placeholders. The project hopes to begin taking input from citizen-scientists late this year.
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Earth's Species To Be Cataloged On the Web 147 comments
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."
Firehose:Encyclopedia of Life launches first 30,000 pages by Anonymous Coward
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30000 pages... (Score:3, Interesting)
I can see it now, like in wikipedia... about 1/10 of the articles are stubs... they mark it as stubs and no one ever remembers to fill them. I would fill them, problem is, I only found the stubs because I was actually searching for that information... not because I had it.
Re: (Score:2)
Find a stub and look at the categories its in.
Dupe? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Dupe? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Dupe? (Score:5, Informative)
From this page here [tolweb.org] at ToL, you can see that there is a collaboration between efforts as to not overlap in data. It also states that the goals of each are slightly different in that EOL focuses more on specific species, whereas the ToL is more about phylogenetic classifications and evolutionary branches. I've been looking into the National Science Foundation's AToL program recently because of an offer for grad school which is due to a grant from that specific program and I'm curious what, if any, connection there is between the two.
180? (Score:2)
Re:180? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
ONLY 30000? (Score:4, Interesting)
There are Tens of millions of different species on earth - Flowering plants ALONE are numbering 250000!
there is another similar project called tree of life [tolweb.org]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
GGCAGGGGTCTATGGTGGCAGGAAGCTTGGCGTGCTAGAGGGTTGTGGTTGGGC
Specifically, a Core Promoter as shared by almost all Eukaryotes.
Where each species differs by one or two characters. I guess
an unfortunate domainname (Score:4, Funny)
Re:an unfortunate domainname (Score:5, Funny)
Download and license (Score:5, Interesting)
The data from tolweb.org are downloadable [tolweb.org] under a Creative Commons license.
Scary!! (Score:2)
Great effort (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, back on topic. This project is grand in its scope and bold in its objectives. Whether it fails or succeeds is beside the point really... the project is a challenge to all of science and is quite like open-source software. The more shoulders (of giants) we can sit on, the better the end result will be.
Great project. Worthwhile project. I take my hat off to all involved. Thank-you.
Badly designed... (Score:5, Informative)
It's slow, only has demonstration pages and is extremely badly designed.
As somebody has already mentioned, images don't have alt tags, but also there are tables used for layout (with many empty rows/cols for no apparent reason) and there are image maps. The site uses an XHTML doctype, but isn't valid XHTML. There are missing slashes for closing single tags. The divs for the popups are contained outside the body tags, that's NOT ALLOWED!
That's all I see, what about anybody else?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Badly designed... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's all I see, what about anybody else?
Well, actually, I see much more. I see a project that seeks to gather every single scrap of data or information about every single taxon on Earth; a database of LIFE, of everything that we know about organisms that share this planet with us. At this point I can gloss over the malformed pages etc etc... that will sort itself out in time. The important thing is that the information and data is available.
Re:Badly designed... (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't "look beyond" the foundations of something. The data is useless if it's so bad it can't be easily worked on, and the information might as well not exist if it's hidden in the bad data.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
oh, flash-tastic! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Oh good, the page has finished loading. Bollocks, there's still some flash left to load."
Will we ever be free of this crap?
It's made a sort of 'two-stage' internet - load the html, then load the flash baggage.
citizen-scientists? (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you mean amateur scientists? Some people refuse to call a spade a spade, referring to it as a "pointy shovel", but you're calling it a "bonk-digger".
Re:Wikipedia, anyone? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Elitest Wikipedia? (Score:4, Informative)