E.O.Wilson has recently written an article outlining compelling reasons for building the "Encyclopedia of Life". He has beautifully described the species portal that we are in the early stages of developing-a tool that will collectively highlight the work of others-and together form the ultimate species web pages.

"Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth, available everywhere by single access on command. The page contains the scientific name of the species, a pictorial or genomic presentation of the primary type specimen on which its name is based, and a summary of its diagnostic traits.

- E.O Wilson

The page opens out directly or by linkage with other databases to a summary of everything known about the species' genome, proteome, geographic distribution, phylogenetic position, habitat, ecological relationships, and, not least, its perceived practical importance for humanity.

The page is definitely expansible. Its contents are continuously peer-reviewed and updated with new information. All the pages together form an encyclopedia, whose content is the totality of comparative biology….."

What follows below are some of the components we have in production that will help contribute to the "Encyclopedia of Life":

ALL Species Toolkit
The ALL Species Toolkit is being designed to provide best of breed tools for anyone involved in species identification. We believe that bringing together pointers to the various species databases, resources and guidelines will help in identifying and publicizing new species as well as highlight access to the work of individual taxonomists.

The toolkit is being built in stages, each feature integrated with the rest. The ALL Species Search Engine, launched in April, is available online at http://www.speciestoolkit.org/ and ties together the many disparate existing species databases. It provides visitors a resource for determining which databases contain information about the taxa of their interest. We have not recently added a lot of content to the database, now at 1.25 million names, in order to apply staff time to developing new tools. Later this year, we will go back and further enhance the range of content for it to search.

Community Board/ Taxonomist Web Pages
The next set of toolkit capabilities in development includes a taxonomist community board, which will provide a place for people to discover information about relevant projects, find out about requests for proposals, and post and view resumes. Our hope is that these community services will provide one place for taxonomists to find specialists in other areas, and discover projects they may not have heard about.

Part of the community board is a membership service which will allow taxonomists to create web pages about themselves and their areas of interest. These pages can include images, species descriptions, and other rich media. They will integrate with the search engine, so that each person can list his or her taxa of expertise with links that hook directly into the search engine. Unlike existing taxonomist databases, these pages are created, edited, and maintained by the taxonomist.

The ALL Species Toolkit's suite of tools also includes the ability for taxonomists to add species to our search engine and publish species web pages. These pages may include images, audio files, species descriptions, etc. They are automatically added to the species search engine and also linked from the taxonomist web pages. We are in the process of completing the taxonomist community board, membership services and species web page publication features. We are incorporating several graphical user interface pieces, and building the essential administrative tools to ensure security and data integrity as well as membership and content management. A beta release will be available on July 15.

You can take a quick look at the alpha version here: http://66.92.26.250:9080/species_toolkit_dev/index.jsp

This suite of tools will provide a platform tying together the work of taxonomists everywhere. This will help those looking for taxonomic expertise, and will accelerate the identification of species by providing one place to visit to discover important resources. Beyond the software supporting the search engine, taxonomist pages and community board, over time the toolkit will also provide links to literature on digitization, collection, publishing, identification and training. It is not our intention to create this information, but rather to point to the resources and, if asked, help publish those that are not available on the Web.

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