The Encyclopedia of Life is born

A group of leading scientific institutions (mostly, for now, American) including Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution have announced this morning in Washington the launch of the Encyclopedia of Life.

It's a vast project aimed at documenting all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants, and other forms of life on Earth, and those yet to be discovered, which was outlined at the TED2007 conference last March by biologist EO Wilson (author of "The diversity of life"), one of the recipients of the TEDPrize. He made it his "TED wish". Indeed, efforts towards an EOL have been  underway since January 2006 (one million pages of scientific literature have already been scanned), but have accelerated after Wilson gave that speech (summary - video) and the McArthur Foundation decided to lead a US$ 50 million funding commitment.

At TED, Wilson called the Encyclopedia "a key tool to inspire preservation of the Earth's biodiversity", and spoke of "an indefinitely expandable webpage for each species".

"For the first time in the history of the planet, scientists, students, and citizens will have multi-media access to all known living species, even those that have just been discovered", states the official announcement. The encyclopedia will be "built on the scientific integrity of thousands of experts around the globe" but live in a "moderated wiki-style environment" -- an elegant way of saying that this won't be an edit-as-you-wish Wikipedia.

In the few weeks since TED, agency Avenue A/Razorfish visualized a great design concept for the Encyclopedia (see a screenshot of a test page above) and created a video to explain the ambitious vision behind the initiative, using photography by Frans Lanting and others: see it here. 

Now the work starts.