The Encyclopedia of Life v2: Providing Global Access to Knowledge About Life on Earth

Abstract

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL, http://eol.org) aims to provide unprecedented global access to a broad range of information about life on Earth. It currently contains 3.5 million distinct pages for taxa and provides content for 1.3 million of those pages. The content is primarily contributed by EOL content partners (providers) that have a more limited geographic, taxonomic or topical scope. EOL aggregates these data and automatically integrates them based on associated scientific names and other classification information. EOL also provides interfaces for curation and direct content addition. All materials in EOL are either in the public domain or licensed under a Creative Commons license. In addition to the web interface, EOL is also accessible through an Application Programming Interface.In this paper, we review recent developments added for Version 2 of the web site and subsequent releases through Version 2.2, which have made EOL more engaging, personal, accessible and internationalizable. We outline the core features and technical architecture of the system. We summarize milestones achieved so far by EOL to present results of the current system implementation and establish benchmarks upon which to judge future improvements.We have shown that it is possible to successfully integrate large amounts of descriptive biodiversity data from diverse sources into a robust, standards-based, dynamic, and scalable infrastructure. Increasing global participation and the emergence of EOL-powered applications demonstrate that EOL is becoming a significant resource for anyone interested in biological diversity.

TraitBank: Practical semantics for organism attribute data

“…42 This datastore is accessed by EOL's application servers and backend data harvesting engine [32]. Virtuoso was selected over other candidate technologies such as Neo4j 43 because using an RDF triple store made it easier to import and blend standard URI-based ontologies, URIs provided by content partners, and when necessary newly minted EOL URIs.…”

“…Especially in the life history and ecology domains ontology coverage is still sparse. EOL staff therefore regularly propose new terms for adoption into ontologies like PATO and CHEBI, and we are involved in efforts to extend the Relations Ontology (RO), 31 Population and Community Ontology (PCO), 32 and Biological Collections Ontology (BCO) 33 to improve coverage of the different dimensions of biotic interactions.…”

“…Synonyms, misspellings, ranks, and parent taxa are taken into account during the reconciliation process. Rather than attempt to fully capture these complex interactions semantically [15], TraitBank reflects data structures already developed to represent the multiple classifications managed in the EOL relational database [32].…”

<I>Carex viridistellata</I> sp. nov. (Cyperaceae), a New Cryptic Species from Prairie Fens of the Eastern United States

“…supertree and supermatrix approaches, and gene tree -species tree reconciliation) and monography (e.g. Scratchpads [Smith et al 2012] and Encyclopedia of Life [Parr et al 2014]). In the collections community, great strides have been made in databasing, georeferencing, and aggregating specimen data (e.g.…”

Study on the Design and Development of Responsive Plants Information Services

“…The EOL aims to provide information on all the organisms on earth, offering information on approximately 3.5 million species (or organisms) gathered from various content providers (Parr et al, 2014). iNaturalist receives pictures of species posted by users and taxonomists resolve species identification (Bacher, 2012).…”