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Complete Encyclopedia of Life to be Made Available Free Online

by Amy Judd | July 26, 2009 at 09:26 am

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The complete Encyclopedia of Life, (EOL), the most comprehensive database about the earth and all the life that lives here, will be made available for free online for the first time ever.

It is an ambitious, even audacious project to organize and make available via the Internet virtually all information about life present on Earth.

It will consist of a series of web sites, one for each of the 1.8 million known species that currently walk or crawl on the earth, and each one of these will be an entry point to a series of more pages, both aimed at the general public, and the more specialized user.

Some of the information made available will include, taxonomy, geographic distribution, genetics, evolutionary history, behavior, and the importance for human well-being.

The staff at EOL is made up of scientists and non-scientists, and they will compile data from all databases and bring it together in one place.

The first draft of the encyclopedia did go live on 26 February 2008 with 30,000 entries, but it had to shut down temporarily for two days when it had over 11 million views.

This complete version:

aims to build one "infinitely expandable" page for each species, including video, sound, images, graphics, as well as text. In addition, the Encyclopedia will incorporate the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which will contain the digitized print collections from the world's major natural history libraries

It has received a US $50 million funding grant from the MacArthur Foundation and the Sloan Foundation.

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