PUBLIC
LECTURE
Encyclopaedia
of Life
By David J
Patterson
Senior
Taxonomist
Encyclopaedia of Life
project
Marine Biological
Laboratory,
USA
When:
Monday 26 October 2009
Drinks and
refreshments from 5.00pm
Lecture
5.30 ? 6.30pm
Where: Shine
Dome
Gordon
Street
Canberra
Cost:
Free entry and parking
Contact: m("science.org.au","ia");
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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.
Speaker
biographical information
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.
