…and it’s not very good.

Almost a year ago, biologist E. O. Wilson brought into existence the Encyclopedia of Life, an exhaustive source of information on all the world’s various species. The site “launched” last year, but just to show the eventual layout and UI. Now the site is up for real (disregarding all the times the server crashes from too many visitors), but not for real real. There are only 25 “complete” pages, and still tons of interface problems.

But still! Though the EOL is now live, it is in beta (so to speak), and basically is live so as to figure out what all those interface problems are. And since they asked for it, criticisms were happily rendered. The verdict? Not so good. Basically, the site suffers from four main problems at the moment.

(1) There is a glaring lack of information, and the information that is there thus far is mismanaged at best:

I think the first release of EOL should have, at a minimum, provided at least as much information that I can get from iSpecies and Wikipedia. Why didn’t EOL? If the argument is that they want authenticated content, then this doesn’t wash. Their authenticated content is minimal, and waiting for authentication will, in my view, cripple EOL.

(2) Where is the hypertext! If I can manage a “related articles” field, then surely so can the EOL.

(3) Poor search capabilities on a site like this practically render the project useless. How do you wade through a billion pages without a good search engine?

It gets worse if I search on “Tyrannosaurus rex”. EOL doesn’t do dinosaurs, and so doesn’t contain anything on T. rex, but the search results tell me that The following 116 search results contain ‘Tyrannosaurus rex’. Nope, none of them do.

The search engine is poorly done, it fails to rank results sensibly, incorrectly reports what it does find, and has no support for spelling mistakes.

(4) Lastly, but not leastly, where’s the openness? Where are the tools necessary for actually using the data on the site?

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. 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!!!

None of these problems are intractable, but they are disheartening considering how much time and money has already been put into the project. I hope the EOL takes to heart the constructive criticism its first offerings have brought, and implements the necessary changes. A year and $10 million should at least be enough to get the project on the right track.

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