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Friday, July 20, 2007

Eyecatchers-4: 'The Encyclopedia of Life' by Riyap KP

ALL ABOUT LIFE : The Encyclopedia of Life (eol)
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If every man's death diminished John Donne, every advancement in the Net elates Suri. This article made me immensely happy as if I had something to do with that advancement. It is so personal! Now to the article:
"This is a free online collaborative bio-encyclopedia to be compiled by experts. It will detail all 1.8 million known plant and animal species in a net archive! This archive would help conservation efforts besides being useful tool for education. It will also provide valuable bio-diversity and conservation information to anyone, anywhere, at any time.

This Wikipedia-style webpage will detail each organism's genome, geographic distribution, phylogenetic position, habitat and ecological relationships. The Bio-diversity Heritage Library will scan tens of millions of pages to provide open access to the relevant scientific literature which it holds. The first 1.25 millions pages have already been digitised in scanning centres in London, Boston, and Washington DC.

The pages are housed at http://www.eol.org/ will provide written information, photos, video, sound, location maps and other multimedia information on each species. The info will be able available in all major languages.

This non-profit project is expected to take about ten years and is being supported with US $ 12.5 million in grants from the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P Sloan Foundation. The founding partners of the project include the Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Smithsonian Institution, the Bio-diversity Heritage Library and the Missouri Botanical Garden." (Gratefully excerpted from The New Indian Express : Education Express dated July 20, 2007)

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