Understanding the work of Nature [God]...

Animals, plants queue up for online Noah’s Ark

Jonathan Leake

London: Scientists are to release the first draft of an Encyclopedia of Life detailing everything known about all living organisms, from the aardvark to the zebu.
When complete the project will detail all 1.8m known plant and animal species. Each will have their own web page in an online archive that will include photographs, genetic information and distribution maps.
This week will see the release of the first 30,000 pages of the project, which will focus on fish, amphibia, large mammals and birds.
It is regarded by the scientists as a triumph but just a small percentage of the likely final total. “This is a great event,” said Robert May, a former president of the Royal Society who is an adviser to the project. “It will help us to sort out all the different species and create a single consistent database.” Scientists have long dreamt of creating a comprehensive encyclopedia listing all known life, but the volume of data accumulated over 250 years of research left everyone who tried it in despair.
However, the advent of Wikipedia and its revolutionary use of so-called “mash-up” software, to aggregate vast amounts of data from disparate sources, showed researchers how they could achieve their dream. The Natural History Museum of London, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington are just three of the many centres pouring data into the encyclopedia. About 2.5m pages of ancient academic journals, drawings and photographs have been scanned into computers ready for publication.
One possibility is that the finished encyclopedia could also include links to video clips taken from television programmes. This weekend the project won the approval of David Attenborough, the maker of programmes such as Life on Earth and the current Life in Cold Blood. “This is a hugely welcome project and long overdue,” he said.
The science of classifying the natural world began with Carl Linnaeus in 1735. He had promised a classification of every known living thing but by the time he reached his 13th and final edition in 1770 and his original 11 pages had expanded to 3,000, it was still incomplete. SUNDAY TIMES