Report prepared for the Experts Meeting Towards the Implementation of a Global Invasive Species
Information Network (GISIN), 6-8 April, 2004. Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
Page 63
8/30/2004
The mission of Discover Life is to assemble
and share knowledge about nature in order
to improve education, health, agriculture,
economic development, and conservation
throughout the world. It will do this via the
Web with funding and support from many
sources, including the National Biological
Information Infrastructure’s (NBII)
contribution to build identification tools. In
addition to the six Sun servers at the
University of Georgia, because of a gift from
Sun Microsystems Inc., we now have a
mirror site served by the Missouri Botanical
Gardens at http://usmo3.discoverlife.org.
Along with the Smithsonian Institution and
other institutions, Discover Life plans to
build an encyclopedia of life. Their goal is to
provide identification guides and serve
information on one million species within ten
years. If different groups and individuals
agree to work together and use the tools
Discover Life now provides, it is possible to
integrate the data and create such an
encyclopedia sooner than this, possibly
within five years. GISIN for example, could
work on the invasive species information,
while other groups work on other datasets.
The Discover Life system consists of
several major components. The All Living
Things component is somewhat like the
table of contents of an encyclopedia.
It allows users to drill down to species
information by clicking on images and
descriptive links. For example, users that
know what information they want and are
familiar with a taxonomic group or species
could select Insects
Kinds of Insects
Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths)
Families (of Lepidoptera), and so on until
they reached a species.
Species Pages
When a specific species is selected (by
clicking on a species name) a species page
is displayed. Species pages are constructed
from images and other information gathered
from multiple (clearly identified) external
Web resources and displayed in a single
Web page for each species. For example,
the Papilio glaucus species page includes
images from a database in Georgia along
with information sourced from the United
States Geological Survey, Butterflies of
North America, and others. This is
accomplished through use of a proxy server
that knows the Universal Resource Locators
(URLs) of the information sources and
gathers, repackages, retrieves, and displays
the information in real time. Information from
other sites is not stored on Discover Life,
but is retrieved from the linked sites each
time a user clicks on a link.
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