…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.

The Encyclopedia of Life has launched.

Now, for those who want some back story:

TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) is a yearly conference held in California, dedicated to bringing together some of the world’s greatest thinkers and doers. Over four days, 50 speakers discuss science, business, the arts, and all the big global issues facing our world. The conference has been selling out a year in advance lately, and is invite-only otherwise, but a collection of past talks is available at the TED site.

Along with the TED conference, the organization introduced the TED Prize two years ago. The prize, $100,000 and a wish to change the world, is given to three winners each year:

Three winners are chosen each year. They could be anyone with worldchanging potential: inventors or entrepreneurs, designers or artists, visionaries or mavericks, story-tellers or persuaders. But they must be people who the judges believe have the ability to inspire others to do something great for the world.

This year, one of the winners was biologist and naturalist E. O. Wilson. His wish? An Encyclopedia of Life.

From Wilson’s acceptance speech at TED2007:

Sadly, our knowledge of biodiversity is so incomplete that we are at risk of losing a great deal of it before it is even discovered. For example, about 200,000 species of all kinds of organisms are currently known from the United States, and the number could easily exceed 500,000 even without including microorganisms. Only about 15 percent of the known species have been studied well enough to evaluate their status. Of the 15 percent evaluated, 20 percent are classified as imperiled to some degree.

We are in short flying blind into our environmental future. We urgently need to change this, We need to have the biosphere properly explored so that we can understand and competently manage it. This should be a Big Science project, equivalent toe the Human Genome project. It should be thought of as a biological moonshot with a timetable. So this brings me to my wish for TEDsters and to anyone else around the world who hears this talk. I wish that we will work together to help create the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth’s biodiversity: the Encyclopedia of Life. The Encyclopedia of Life. What is it? It is an encyclopedia that lives on the Internet and is contributed to by thousands of scientists around the world. It has an indefinitely expandable page for each species. It makes the key information about life on earth accessible to all on demand.

This is not the first attempt at such an endeavor (see: Wikispecies, Catalogue of Life), but it absolutely the one with the best potential to succeed. It has the most presence, especially within the scientific and intellectual community, and has started to get funding. Furthermore, it has plans to be amazingly comprehensive (or encyclopedic, if you will), with the ability to show as much or as little information necessary for the intended audience (from novice to expert). Looking for simple information? Visit the polar bear page. Want something more technical? Visit the ursus maritimus page. (See the demonstration pages for what I mean.) The encyclopedia’s ability to be not only be an expansive resource for scientists, but also accessible to the public, will be the source of its success and power.

Supplemental to Wilson’s TED speech is a page on the EOL site that gives a more in depth discussion of the encylopedia’s necessity and benefit:

At the end of the day and at a deeper level, the all-species encyclopedia will transform the very nature of biology. The reason is that biology is primarily a descriptive science. Although it depends upon a solid base of physics and chemistry for its functional explanations, and upon the theory of natural selection for its evolutionary explanations, it is defined uniquely by the particularity of its elements. Each species is a small universe in itself, from its genetic code to its anatomy, behavior, life cycle, and environmental role, a self-perpetuating system created during an almost unimaginably complicated evolutionary history. Each species merits careers of scientific study and celebration by historians and poets. Nothing of the kind can be said (at the risk of stating the obvious) for each proton or inorganic molecule.

Taxonomy, the scientific study and practice of classification, is foundational to the all-species encyclopedia. However, it is still one of the most underfunded and weakly developed biological disciplines. Worldwide as few as 6000 biologists work within it. Most people are surprised to learn that most of biodiversity is still entirely unknown. They assume that taxonomy all but wound down generations ago, so that today each new species discovered is a newsworthy event. The truth is that we do not know how many species of organisms exist on Earth even to the nearest order of magnitude. Those formally diagnosed and given Latinized scientific names are thought to number somewhere between 1.5 and 1.8 million, with no exact accounting having yet been made from the taxonomic literature. Estimates of the full number, known plus unknown, vacillate wildly according to method. As summarized in the Global Biodiversity Assessment (1995), they range from an improbable 3.6 million at the low end to an equally improbable 100 million or more at the high end. The commonest order-of-magnitude guess is ten million.

As fascinating as all of this is, I could go on quoting forever, but if you’ve managed to stay with me this long, just visit the site.