Encyclopedia of Life | Hacker News Reader

Encyclopedia of Life

eol.org

104 pointsmatthberg20 comments

And some shameless plugs-

One of the EOL lead devs is now a member of our group https://speciesfilegroup.org/. We have two open-source projects that seek to contribute in this field, TaxonWorks, https://taxonworks.org, a web-workbench that lets you gather the data behind these types of pages and TaxonPages, an effort to make it possible, ultimately, for anyone to produce Species/Taxon pages - https://github.com/SpeciesFileGroup/taxonpages/. We expect to have 50k+ TaxonPages (akin to species pages) available this year as we transition some legacy data forward.

Wildly OT, but: The domain name is a bit funny, when I read "eol" my brain jumps to "end of life". ;-)

Morbid, but, encyclopedias like this may be the only reminders we have of life before the great extinction event we're living in at the moment.

for a computer guy, "end of line", surely?

As a software developer I definitely run into “end-of-life” a lot more than “end of line.”

well, if you have a full-sized keyboard, you will see the (goto) end (of line) key peering up at you all the time. but i must admit, i hardly ever use it.

a) the key just says "end", not "eol" b) the key itself I use rarely, but as an emacs user I do hit Ctrl-e often, which is the equivalent.

I'm not sure I've ever seen it used like that. Either "\n" or LF/CRLF.

But I haven't paid very close attention. ;-)

CRLF

CR (pre OS X)

Or the rare LRCF.

With Subtree of Life you can find relationships between species:

https://sol.vandenoever.info/

If you like Subtree of Life, you're going to love 'Onezoom' (https://www.onezoom.org/) which is a very attractive 'Google Maps of life' sort of site, and TimeTree (http://www.timetree.org/) which is similar but the visualisation is much more traditional (not fractals) in comparison with the first.

FWIW, TimeTree is based on phylogenic trees sourced from the the literature:

https://timetree.org

... and publishes references to the literature backing a relationship.

This is important since the tree you get can vary even depending on the gene you study, which can raise some questions about how to interpret these trees.

The info on that site is... not even close to correct. Choanozoa as the sister group of all other life including bacteria and archaea? All eukaryotes broken into Opisthokonta, Chloroplastida, and Amoebozoa? Maybe the stuff on metazoans is more accurate, but in the big picture of the genetic diversity of life on earth they're barely a footnote.

Here's an example: two bird species selected via uid share as most recent_common ancestor Passeriformes.

https://sol.vandenoever.info/?uids=695336,1093902

When another bird species is added, one more closest common ancestor pops up:

https://sol.vandenoever.info/?uids=695336,1065606,1093902

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor

The tree only shows species that are selected and their closest common ancestors.

The relationships are obtained from opentreeoflife.org.

wikidata [1] [2] has "few" species with links to many other databases like

* plazi.org list taxonomic treatment (~ species description) found in journals, papers using OCR when needed.

* gbif.org list specimens (and other things) using normalized datasets provided by various institutions (including Plazi).

one process among many others : some algorithms run by GBIF find potential matches between species and specimens, with some human curation, we can link between a specimen and the related papers.

[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q309337 [2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q106254624

It turns out that humans have a "litters per year" of approximately 0.3.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com