PUBLIC LECTURE

The Encyclopaedia of Life

By David J Patterson
The Shine Dome, Canberra, Monday 26 October 2009

David J Patterson
Senior Taxonomist
Encyclopaedia of Life project
Marine Biological Laboratory, USA

David’s academic interests were in the evolution and systematics of protozoa at the Universities of Bristol (England) and Sydney (Australia). He has published over 160 scientific papers and books. As the inaugural head of the Biodiversity Informatics Group of EOL, he was responsible for establishing the infrastructure and web-site for that project. He is an advocate for the importance of incorporating taxonomic thinking within biodiversity informatics, and that biodiversity informatics should define future taxonomy. He is a member of the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature, and a senior advisor to the Sloan Foundation.

About the project

The Encyclopaedia of Life (www.eol.org) is an ambitious project that is realising the vision of EO Wilson to create a web page for every species on Earth. The project is organised around components that provide the secretarial support (Smithsonian Institution) deal with informatics (Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole), research (Field Museum), learning and education (Harvard University), page content (Smithsonian Institution), and the biodiversity literature (the Biodiversity Heritage Library – a consortium of over 30 libraries world-wide). It is expanding to include an array of national regional nodes; agreements have been made with the Netherlands, Australia and China, and many more are under development). A little over two years from receiving its first funding, EOL now delivers about 1,500,000 species pages. The rate of growth has been made possible by its strategy of aggregating data objects that are already available on-line from the web sites of content partners. EOL uses names to index information, and has developed devices to overcome the problems caused by one species having more than one name, and one name being used for more than one species. This ‘taxonomically intelligent’ infrastructure is now being made available so that it can be used by any project that manages biodiversity information. EOL actively supports the distribution of information and welcomes participation. Content is freely available under Creative Commons attribution licenses, the code base is openly available, and we provide Lifedesks (lifedesks.org), a biological content management system to assist taxonomists get information onto the internet.