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