Encyclopedia Of Life

Easily one of the most exciting new sites to launch recently (along with 23 & Me, which I’ll get around to writing about one of these days) is Encyclopedia of Life (eol.org). Hold on, no cutesy Web 2.0-style name? Nope. This site is business. Beautiful, inspirational, important business.

In their own words:

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is an ambitious, even audacious project to organize and make available via the Internet virtually all information about life present on Earth. At its heart lies a series of Web sites—one for each of the approximately 1.8 million known species—that provide the entry points to this vast array of knowledge. The entry-point for each site is a species page suitable for the general public, but with several linked pages aimed at more specialized users. The sites sparkle with text and images that are enticing to everyone, as well as providing deep links to specific data.

The EOL dynamically synthesizes biodiversity knowledge about all known species, including their taxonomy, geographic distribution, collections, genetics, evolutionary history, morphology, behavior, ecological relationships, and importance for human well being, and distribute this information through the Internet. It serves as a primary resource for a wide audience that includes scientists, natural resource managers, conservationists, teachers, and students around the world. We believe that the EOL's encompassing scope and innovation will have a major global impact in facilitating biodiversity research, conservation, and education.

The EOL staff is made up of scientists and non-scientists working from museums and research institutions around the world. We currently have 20 full time employees, but as this project grows, so will the EOL family.

In my own words:

Wow.

Here’s a screengrab of one of the species pages:


I truly love the web design work here. The site is clean and sophisticated without being boring or overly dense, like one might imagine an encyclopedia page to be (particularly if Wikipedia is used as an example). And the “Detail” slider, which lets you adjust the amount of information displayed about the species, is one of the coolest new interface elements I’ve seen on a site.

There’s way to much to say about the Encyclopedia of Life project, so I’ll leave it to the folks involved to do so in video form. Please do watch the two videos below, check out some of the exemplar pages, which show the fullness of the entries that will one day exist for all species on Earth, and imagine this resource 5, 10, or 25 years from now.


EOL Video 1


EOL Video 2