First edition of Encyclopedia of Life goes online
Great new asset for ALL students young and old!
MONTEREY, California (AFP) — A premier edition of an unprecedented online Encyclopedia of Life was unveiled Wednesday as part of an ambitious project to catalogue the 1.8 million species known on Earth.
The first pages were unofficially made available on the Internet at http://www.eol.org/ a day earlier, encountering such fierce demand that overwhelmed computer servers crashed for about two hours.
The encyclopedia was then unveiled at the prestigious Technology, Entertainment and Design gathering in California, and despite being offline for a time, the aspiring catalogue of Earth's precious biodiversity logged more than 11 million hits in its first six hours.
"The Encyclopedia of Life will have a profound and creative effect in science," Wilson said. "It aims not only to summarize all that we know of Earth's life forms, but also to accelerate the discovery of the vast array that remain unknown. This great effort promises to lay out new directions for research in every branch of biology."
Consolidating the information about the planet's 1.8 million species in a single place is unprecedented.
"It is exciting to anticipate the scientific chords we might hear once 1.8 million notes are brought together through this instrument," said EOL executive director Jim Edwards.
Later this year EOL will let people contribute pictures, video, facts or other content to the website "wiki-style."
