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Published online 26 February 2008 | Nature 451, 1038- (2008) | doi:10.1038/4511038b
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First chapter of book of life goes live
Online encyclopedia launches first data.
The ambitious Encyclopedia of Life project published its first web pages on Earth’s biological diversity on 26 February — one species per page.
Born of a 2003 essay by biologist Edward O.
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I personally think its a brilliant and very valuable idea however website is either non stop down or forbids entering it... Why i wasnt more patient at school? i could help now...
I still have not found the details of the first page after 1 hour rummaging through your web site. It needs to be simplified before it will be widely used. I am a retired researcher who has time to search but even I had to give up because of difficulties. I could have added to your data base if I could have found out how to do it. A. A. Berryman
This looks like the birth of something that can only grow and grow. I'm not just referring to the number of species described, but also the indexing and range. Since I maintain a blog about the evolutionary origins of speech (Babel's Dawn), I'm particularly looking forward to the day when the project is established enough to start including extinct species. Imagine an encyclopaedia with all known species, living and dead.
I've got to wonder why a new, single focus, and nearly empty encyclopedia is a better solution than building on the already widely adopted and richly populated Wikipedia. The diversity of related information in Wikipedia (geography, biographies, cross-discipline articles, ...) is a valuable asset that this new encyclopedia will not offer.
I think the project is wonderful, as long as it is open to the public to read, and links to/from Wikipedia are easily created. The benefit of restricting access to authorities and experts is to keep out non-scientific criticism, delay, obfuscation, and generally poor quality material. Look at the problems with Wikipedia arising from faith-based zealots, regarding evolution, for example. I would hope that making use of experts now retired or otherwise not part of the institutions that control the site will be undertaken: what a great way to tap their energy and knowledge. Links to and from Wikipedia are so easy to create that coordination will not be a problem. Coincidentally, this same Nature issue has a news item about the initial deposit to the seed bank in Norway. Would it not be wonderful to include DNA samples of each entry in the "book of life" in a similar repository?
Please include www in the url you have cited in the beginning of the article. Many people have been trying to get into the site from there and have failed to do so.
Sorry to say, I think this approach is doomed to failure. To survive it must attract scientists interested in disseminating their knowledge and appreciating that this is the tool that will allow them to do it. Starting with converting Richard Dawkins' "The ancestor's tale" might be a better start. I know this is an early version, but EOL has, for instance, for fish; distribution; how how they are caught; and if they are eaten or used for fertilizer or animal feed. There is nothing interesting about their biology, e.g. that Polar (artic)cod (Boreogadus saida) blood is full of antifreeze protein that looks superficially like the similar protein in the "bloodless" toothed ice fish of the antarctic. The evolution of these proteins arose, however, twice from different genes fragments. Science isn't just stamp collecting.
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation providing only $10 million Their press-release here: http://www.macfound.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=lkLXJ8MQKrH&b=1053853&content_id={D8DE6019-A00E-402A-AADC-B7EE7DB1FF15}¬oc=1
Indeed a great idea and a great book. But it will be short of definition of life. Life is the manifestation of execution of divine biosofoftware and death is the deletion of the biosoftware. An organism is a natural biocomputer. For more information, see my two books: 1) "The Computer Universe" and 2) "The Great Gene Fiasco" both published by Adam Publishers and Distributors, New Delhi, India.