Science News on the EOLAlta BudenTuesday,
February 5th, 2008In last week’s issue of Science News there was a wonderful article about us by Susan Milius:“Biological Moon Shot–Realizing the dream of a Web page for every living thing”
(Week of Feb. 2, 2008; Vol. 173, No. 5 , p. 72)
The article covers much of what is currently going on in the EOL in these last few pre-launch weeks, it does an especially good job of conveying how accessible and useful the EOL will be in the future while at the same time explaining some of the reasons why it will take some time for it to realize it’s full potential.
I highly encourage anyone interested to read the whole article for themselves, but here is a nice tidbit from it that I added some links to:
“Sample encyclopedia Web pages show flashy images and videos plus links to the latest genetic sequences and a scan of the page of the book in which the first published description of a species appeared. Cool, yes, but time-consuming. Developing entries of that quality for millions of species will take years, and Edwards doesn’t want the world to lose interest in the meantime.
So, the encyclopedia will release something fast, but just a small something: a portal to basic info on fish. The creators will present the pages as a work in progress, soliciting user comments.
Visitors will be able to admire a portrait of the zebra turkeyfish and a map of its range in the Pacific, for example, or learn that the white-spotted boxfish typically frequents tropical waters 1 meter to 30 m deep. The modern Latin names will be paired with tables of common names in dozens of languages.
The fish information itself won’t be an encyclopedia creation. Instead, the informatics specialists are building a new portal to an existing site, called FishBase. This strategy illustrates how such a grand undertaking as the compendium of all living things might just be possible. The project won’t start from scratch with 10,000 taxonomists typing until they create an encyclopedia. Specialists have already made databases with reliable information, and the encyclopedia will provide a central entryway for using these trusted sources.
“Everybody wants his or her favorite organism there first,” says Edwards. “If you’re a leech lover, you want leeches. If you’re a spider lover, you want spiders.” What the encyclopedia crew is actually going to present next, with or just after the fish, are plants in the Solanaceae family—including tomatoes, peppers, petunias, tobaccos, and potatoes. “It’s timely, because 2008 is the International Year of the Potato,” says Edwards. (Not a joke. See “It’s Spud Time”.)
As the Encyclopedia of Life grows, its tools will capture the latest research to enrich those sources. Google-like aggregation technology will register new publications or gene sequences, for example, that appear on the Web.
“The most exciting thing about this project to me is that we have a blizzard of information coming at us all the time—and it’s not just in science, it’s everywhere,” says Mark Westneat of the encyclopedia group based at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Financiers monitoring markets and even travelers wondering whether to pack boots have some fine systems for sifting out the desired snowflakes from all the rest of the information. “Biologists are a little bit behind in informatics tools,” he says.
The fish segment illustrates another feature of the encyclopedia plan: the quality of sources. Westneat, who studies reef fishes, encountered FishBase in its larval stage at a biologists’ gathering in the Philippines in 1995. One of its originators, fish biologist Rainer Froese, brought an early version of this database and appealed to his colleagues to groom glitches out of it and supply photographs. “We grudgingly did so,” says Westneat. “We thought, ‘Oh, this will be nice for school kids and stuff, but I’ll never use it.’” Then heroic efforts by William Eschmeyer of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco standardized the taxonomy with up-to-date forms and lists of synonymous names. “All of a sudden, FishBase became this incredibly valuable resource,” Westneat says. “I use it every day.”
Such trustworthy information isn’t just swimming free in the seas. “A significant challenge facing the Encyclopedia of Life is engaging the scientific community to provide content,” says botanist Richard Ree of the Field Museum. “Similar initiatives have been tried in the past, and I think it’s safe to say that none met with resounding success.”
Ree does add that the project has advantages over previous proposals. The star power of E.O. Wilson and the TED conference attendees could catalyze interest from the corporate sector and allow access to its considerable experience in developing tools for managing computer information.
The encyclopedia planners are well aware of the need for active support from scientists, says Westneat. He leads a team focusing on how to make the encyclopedia so useful that scientists will decide that providing top-quality information is worth their time. “The scientific community is going to make the Encyclopedia of Life rich, and it’s going to make it correct,” he says. In turn, that gold standard information should enrich the specialists’ pursuits.”
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