Encyclopedia of Life Blog

Hi Folks,

As some of you may or may not have noticed, without any fanfare, we released a substantial update to the Encyclopedia of Life website on January 5, 2009.  We are calling it version 2, and in fact, if you look at the footer of the www.eol.org pages, you will now see our internal version number right there (today at 2.0.11).

So what’s new, you ask?  Well, a whole bunch actually:

1. You can now tag images and then search for species associated with those images (e.g. “blue”, “marine”).  You can tag any image you want and once several people tag an image in the same way, it is promoted to a “public” tag viewable by all.
2. You can comment on species, images or blocks of text.  Content providers will then be able to see your comments to help improve their material.
3. You can add your own images to the EOL Flickr Group that, when tagged correctly, will automatically appear in EOL species pages.
4. We now distinguish between “trusted” and “unknown” content with clear messages and colors and will soon invite curators to help indicate the trust level of content.
5. And of course, many new species pages and more content, adding to the overall richness of the experience.

For a more complete listing of what’s been added, along with some screen-shots, head on over to the “What’s New?” page.  We’ve already begun working on the next set of features to add, with some great additions like public APIs high on the list.  The real fun will begin once the APIs are released and we begin seeing mashups between EOL and other projects – we can’t wait.

Thanks and enjoy,

Peter

Tags: website

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 10:25 am and is filed under Biodiversity Informatics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.