For National Geographic / Discovery channel-types or for those of you with inquisitive kids – here's an ambitious project to immerse visitors in all of the species of Organisms on Earth, coming in 2008:
http://www.eol.org/
“Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity”
Watch the video – starts out slow but they give you a nice preview of what is to come including some nice integration with Google Earth and an interesting means of traversing the nodes of a genus/species evolutionary classification tree.
Tomas Roldan
Strategists & Planners