The Enyclopedia of Life is finally live. I signed up (yep, look for ‘mndoci’), like you’d expect and the site, at first glance, is very pleasing to the eye (as opposed to most of the dryer looking Wiki-like content out there). Right now, only about 25 pages are supposedly fully fleshed out (authenticated and complete). Many others are authenticated but not as information rich and the majority need to be authenticated and filled out.
I’d like to re-iterate what I have said in the past. The project is ambitious, much needed and to be supported, but I have some concerns/comments as well and here they are
The Encyclopedia is not a Wiki, so calling it the Wikipedia of life is somewhat of a misnomer. The editing capabilities are limited to approved people. Since this is meant to be an authoritative source, perhaps that’s OK, but there are other mechanisms to do this and I have a feeling that the current approach really slows down the sites development. As Roderic Page points out in his rather brilliant critique, “The insistence on “authenticated (endorsed)” content places a severe brake on what EOL can offer. ”
Perhaps what bugs me more than anything else, for what is mostly a well designed website, is that so many things that make the web powerful are missing. The search SUCKS!!! There is a ton of structure on the site, but no support for semantics (where is the RDF?), or microformats. There is no RSS feed for a specific species or for the latest species to be added. there is no place to have a discussion. There is no API. I would love answers to those questions. As we leave what we knew as “web 2.0″ behind, it should be clear to anyone designing a web resource that in the absence of programmatic interactions, a site will languish. In the absence of community, the site will die. I hope EOL addresses these issues ASAP. In the absence of structured information, I’d love to be able to pull the data from EOL into Freebase, mirroring the structure and building relationships. GIVE ME AN API!!!
For more, just go read Rod Page. He’s the smart one and apparently agrees
Further reading:
The Encyclopedia of Life
Carl Zimmer’s NY Times piece
Technorati Tags: Encyclopedia of Life, Web Services, Search, API
10 Comments
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”).
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”).
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
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
50-50 chances to compare it to Wikipedia, at least my though
50-50 chances to compare it to Wikipedia, at least my though
Over 2 years have passed -what's changed?
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/public/BIG+update+a...
Cheers,
Pete
That's an impressive list; thanks for the update. Do you happen to know if the 'Species' microformat is being considered?
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.
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