27 February 08
Encyclopedia of Life Opens Its Pages
Today I went to a presentation about the Encyclopedia of Life, a project to provide a set of web pages for every one of the 1.8 million species on Earth. As it turns out, the first incarnation of the site went live yesterday, and proved to be too popular for the site’s own good, their computers quickly crashing under the load — they got about 19 million hits yesterday!
The site has initially been populated with about 30,000 entries, with 25 of these being selected to serve as exemplars showing what the fully fleshed-out content will look like. They hope to have entries for all the named species within a decade.
On the way down to this presentation in San Francisco, I was able to do some public transport bigbying. From the train I saw a ring-necked pheasant, marbled godwits, willets, and a ruddy turnstone. Best of all was seeing a flock of red-masked parakeets, the birds made famous by the story of the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill.
Previous: Rattling Around Upstairs Next: Wolverine Sighted In California
I thought I saw you today (Sat.), Numenius, biking in Berkeley.
This sounds interesting. I hope they’ll put stilts on it – the ones that breed here almost my favourite birds right now. Have just tried to access the site- in vain. Too many people trying still, I guess.
Since the train doesn’t go to SF itself, this must mean the parakeets have expanded to the east bay … are they taking over?
No, I took BART and the bus to get to my destination in SF from the train station.