[Taxacom] Species Pages -> SpeciesIndex?

[Roger Hyam]

Hi,

I wrote to the list a few weeks ago asking for the location of Species  
Pages (Species Pages - where are the online descriptions?) and started  
what was a pretty long thread that went off in several directions as  
Taxacom threads tend to...

Thank you to all who contributed to this interesting discussion.

My motivation for the posting was my work on the notion that an index  
to species pages could act as a catalyst for integration.  I have put  
together a rough index of around 160,000 pages as an experiment. It  
doesn't have even coverage of life and is just over 50% Wikipedia  
pages but it illustrates the basic notion that we could build an  
interconnected global taxonomy without a tremendous amount of work or  
money. It maps pages to TaxonConcept GUIDs and extracts RDF from RDFa  
- potentially a route to further integration. You can see it here:

http://www.speciesindex.org/

I have a more detailed blog posting about the idea here:

http://www.hyam.net/blog/archives/272

I would be grateful for your thoughts on where we could take this - or  
whether I should "knock it on the head". I must stress that this is  
experimental/fun stuff at the moment but that it could lead to  
something more significant in the future if it showed potential.

All the best,

Roger