The New York Times published an Op-ed piece by E.O. Wilson today.
… a new project in biology, an ambitious effort to create a vast new electronic database of known species, should make it possible to discover the remaining 90 percent of species in far less than 250 years, perhaps only one-tenth that time, a single human generation. On May 9 of this year, a consortium of institutions from Harvard and the Smithsonian to The Atlas of Living Australia began compiling The Encyclopedia of Life, which one day will provide single-portal access to all knowledge of living organisms.
Simultaneously, an interview with David “Paddy” Patterson was published in the journal Nature:
In February next year, hopefully, there will be a major release of the first
edition of the EOL. The expectation is that within a ten-year period we will
have relatively well-informed pages on all 1.8 million species.
. . .
Some of the features we’re developing will be rather like wikis or the
social networking software out there. One of the things I would love to see
develop early on is a ‘my schoolyard’ function in which kids can go outside
with cell phones and take pictures of organisms and submit them to the EOL.
There, the pictures are sent off to experts who verify identification. And
when that is done, a little dot appears on Google Earth showing the presence
of, say, a daffodil in someone’s backyard.
My listservs, ecoblogs, and ADW staff emails are buzzing.
Some of my colleagues have been skeptical. We’ve heard these grand plans before, weren’t consulted about the technical details, and had no idea if there were opportunities for us. Donat Agosti plainly states that it is “a secretive project.” As I mentioned in a previous post, this “new” project rests on the backs of many of us who have been toiling, underfunded, for years to get information online and easily available to the public.
This latest PR seems to me an offensive in pursuit of more funding — but for whom? Even if EOL wants to keep the organizing membership elite (Harvard, Smithsonian, etc.), I’d urge the EOL organizers to reach out more to the community whose research should be informing their efforts. For example, parts of the My Schoolyard concept have already been tested by the BioKIDS project. And of course Spire is working on an even more Web 2.0 approach with our semantic Spotter tools.
I’ve been told that TDWG (Taxonomic Databases Working Group) standards are going to be followed. But there’s quite a lot of flux now. Will taxon names get marked up with TaxonX or TaXMLit? With the species microformat? I’ve also heard that there is a semantic web component planned — but haven’t seen the plan for how to mesh with existing efforts like ours (ETHAN, etc.) and the nascent Biological Observation standard. Others, such as David Shorthouse, have provided helpful suggestions.
Personally, I am less concerned about which standards and technologies are chosen as long as there is some sensible web service allowing the exchange of information. I am even willing to concede that semantics-lite approaches may mostly work. It is more important to me that we can support each other in building high-quality, user-friendly sites. I say sites because there will always be a role for special-purpose sites. Wikipedia is great but it hasn’t put everyone else on the web out of business. A portal like EOL won’t either.
