The Difference Between a Tree of Life and an Encyclopedia of Life = Money

I asked David Maddison, the creator of the awesome Tree of Life web project, what he thought about the recently-announced, E.O. Wilson-backed, $25 million-funded Encyclopedia of Life. To me the two efforts sounded strikingly similar. Maddison's take on whether the projects are competitive or complimentary is a bit different from James Hanken's, a Harvard researcher helping to organize EOL who we interviewed here.

KP: What do you think about the Encyclopedia of Life project? Do you see it as a competitor to yours? Aren't you already cataloging life?

DM: Big question, and a delicate one. Yes, the two projects have the exact same goals; the EOL is basically the ToL but with LOTS more money. It has taken me a long time and a lot of effort to convince the EOL folks to recognize that they projects are basically the same, something that many other folks have recognized.

The goal of the ToL was to catalogue all life, both branches and leaves of the Tree. The EOL's goals are the same, except that they plan to focus on leaves (species) and have not planned to actually gather content themselves (they generally present their project as an aggregation of content already available on the web).

I hatched the idea in 1988 to do the ToL, but at the time it wasn't in the context of the web, I was instead going to build hyperlinking into a phylogenetics program I was building at the time (MacClade).

But then the web came along, and I reopened the idea in 1994. Wayne, my brother, and I started the programming in 1994, and the first version when up in early 1995. From there until 2000, we existed on a grand total of $16,000, and since then we have got some NSF grants.
We existed in good part because of the efforts of the biologists contributing content.

The EOL folks basically ignored us entirely until we started contacting them, and even then it took a while to get them to talk. But then this
April Jim Edwards, the director, and Mark Westneat, a key player at the
Field Museum, had a one-day meeting with us in Tucson. That was a very good meeting, and we came to some solid agreements about the future.
We can't compete with a 25+ million dollar gorilla, nor do we want to:
I think the EOL could be spectacular, and want to support it as much as possible, but at the same time I don't want to lose the good ideas and content of the ToL.

So, the plan is that we will be an "essential partner" for the EOL, providing them with content, primarily about branches, and we will pull back on leaves. They will supply us with leaf information. How it all works out will depend upon their support, both financial and otherwise.

Perhaps the biggest issue that I see in all this is who will be providing the content. Because EOL views itself as an aggregator, it can only be successful if the information is out there to be aggregated. And for small groups of organisms (e.g., vertebrates), it is available. But for the bulk of life on earth, the information is simply not out there to be had in electronic form. For example, take the group that I work on, beetles. There are over 300,000 species -
and for almost all of those the ONLY information on the web is a name, and for many, there isn't even the name. It's not at all clear from where the EOL plans to get this information.