Encyclopedia of Life
The goal of the Encylopedia of Life (EOL) program is to build a reliable online encyclopedia with a Web page for every species.
The EOL should serve both as a handy field guide for millions of users and as a “macroscope” to discover patterns in ecology and evolution otherwise too large or complex to perceive.
Initiated jointly with the MacArthur Foundation in early 2007, Sloan is supporting the EOL consortium to create pages for 500,000 species within 5 years, and pages for all 1.8 million or so named animals, plants, and fungi within 10 years using a combination of aggregation technology (to automatically assemble provisional pages) and a wiki approach (to improve the quality of the pages). EOL launched with 35,000 species pages in February 2008 and has since grown to contain pages for more than 170,000 species.
