Encyclopedia of Life

I've been interested in Biology for quite some time. One of my early introductions was a book by Edward O. Wilson. I loved it, and it helped steer me toward doing strange things like reading biology textbooks in my spare time. I love the stuff. There are three areas that interest me most: 1) endocrinology, 2) biodiversity, and 3) taxonomy (or systemics).

As any of you reading this know, I have been watching TED for quite some time. It's a great source for videos of talks on science. A few of them are on biology. I rather enjoy "hanging out" there, when I have some free time. Last November, I was browsing around and found out about the TED Prize, which is awarded every now and then to "the biggest ideas". Lo and behold! One of the prizes was awarded to good old E.O. Wilson. His big idea was to create an "Encyclopedia of Life" (EOL): it would be like Wikipedia, with a collection of all the known information about all the known species. It would be editable by the public (but filtered by experts). It would "mine" as much information as it could from other scientific sources. Everything.

Awesome.

I checked it out. At the time, it was not yet online. Now it is. You can look at it here, if it's up: they've been overwhelmed with traffic. : )