bbgm - the discussion - Latest Comments in The Encylopedia of Life – Live and beautiful, but many questions

Re: The Encylopedia of Life – Live and beautiful, but many questions

Peter Mangiafico — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:45:58 -0000

Good question - I believe we've had discussions in the past but I don't know the status (I've been out of day to day work on EOL for over six months). I know that the API (which will return XML or JSON) is a top priority at the moment. There is also an alphabet soup of projects related to taxonomy and species names that are related to but not part of EOL (including but not limited to GNI, GNA, GNITE, etc. etc.). See globalnames.org for more info. David Patterson is a key person on those projects.

Re: The Encylopedia of Life – Live and beautiful, but many questions

Andy Mabbett — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 17:14:43 -0000

That's an impressive list; thanks for the update. Do you happen to know if the 'Species' microformat is being considered?

Re: The Encylopedia of Life – Live and beautiful, but many questions

Peter Mangiafico — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:32:10 -0000

While I am no longer directly working on EOL, actually quite a lot has changed. Just off the top of my head:

1. "Latest changes" RSS feeds for species pages
2. Curator network and curator tools
3. Integration with Flickr and Wikipedia
4. Over 200,000 pages with photos and/or some text
5. Multiple classifications with selector
6. Comments and tags
7. Dozens of new content partners.
8. An iPhone app for quick upload to the EOL flickr group.
9. More stuff I can't think off.

There is a group of developers actively working and maintaing the code. The big item still missing is the robust public API - I agree that is critical. There was an initial API that wasn't advertised, and there is a more complete API currently in private beta that will hopefully fulfill most needs.

For all the updates your heart can desire, see our release notes:

http://wiki.eol.org/display...

Cheers,
Pete

Re: The Encylopedia of Life – Live and beautiful, but many questions

Andy Mabbett — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 16:36:38 -0000

Over 2 years have passed -what's changed?

Re: The Encylopedia of Life – Live and beautiful, but many questions

Johny — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 08:21:51 -0000

50-50 chances to compare it to Wikipedia, at least my though

Re: The Encylopedia of Life – Live and beautiful, but many questions

Peter Mangiafico — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:05:06 -0000

Hi folks,

I'm with the EOL development team and I just wanted to say that we appreciate your feedback and thoughts. I'd encourage you to join the discussion on the EOL forums. This project is really a collaborative effort and as soon as we have the infrastructure in place, we'd like to turn some of this energy to helping the project along. Keep in mind that we've only been building this site for about six months now and this is a first release (we almost called it an alpha...). Things like APIs, better searching, RSS, tagging, and other "web 2.0" features are all things we've talked about quite a bit and know we want to do. But at some point, we wanted to release something to the public so we can start the conversation about what the community wants to see next. There is so much to do on some many fronts and as with any project, we are resource constrained. We believe we have the servers in a better shape to handle the load. Thanks for your interest,

Peter

Re: The Encylopedia of Life – Live and beautiful, but many questions

Andrew Perry — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 03:36:13 -0000

I only briefly grepped the FAQ, but I can't seem to find mention of what license the content on the Enyclopedia of Life will be under.

Even with an API, the wrong license could prevent the data being dumped into Freebase.

EOL looks like a nice idea that could still be very useful, but it does seem to miss the point of the 'new Web' (makes me think of the tired old joke "1997 called, they want their project back").