Encyclopedia of Life Established May 2007 First version of portal went online Feb year goals –Assemble infinitely expandable web pages for all known species (~ 2 million) Via partnerships with content providers, scientists, citizen scientists, schools –Digitize major component of biodiversity literature –Use pages to synthesize new knowledge –Incorporate EOL into school curricula –Develop robust software –Working with partners, solve the taxonomy problem –Develop Web 2.0 (social) components

Accomplishments in first year Established governance structure and 5 components Made collaborations with key partners –GBIF, Catalogue of Life, Tree of Life Web, FishBase, AmphibiaWeb, AntWeb, Solanaceae Source, … Set up web site; serving ~40,000 vetted species pages Established Flickr site for submitting photos Are developing curator network Digitized more than 8 million pages of literature Leveraged intellectual capital (BioSynC workshops) Began connections with education community Formed Institutional Council to help internationalize EOL

Species pages enhancements By Dec : –Mechanism for distinguishing vetted and unvetted information –LifeDesks –Template for producing species pages –Registry for data sets to be made available through EOL –User tagging –Open commenting In 2009: –Curators listed on pages –Digital Object Identifiers for pages –New and better searches, navigations –Triple stores, machine interfaces, language processing & other data mining tools to extract atomised information

Other future enhancements EOL will focus on marine biodiversity for next 3-4 years Major focus on internationalization Regional EOLs—first in Netherlands Automatic population of species pages with information on newly published species Interoperability with Encyclopedia of Earth and GEO ecosystem classification project (Roger Sayres) Repositories for taxon-based document stores Pilot project on EOL Fellows

Implementing the integrated global biodiversity information portal e-Biosphere 09 –International biodiversity informatics conference, London, 1-5 June 2009 –Develop a roadmap for how the biodiversity informatics projects can/will interoperate –Seek feedback from users –Several sessions for users to describe what kinds of tools and services they want and need –Bursaries available for individuals from developing countries

Possible CAS/EOL partnerships Participate in curatorial network

Possible CAS/EOL collaborations Participate in curatorial network Sponsor EOL Fellows Help with internationalization of EOL, e.g. –Establish regional EOL(s) –Aid in serving information in languages other than English Aid in digitizing Chinese biodiversity literature

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