After building its initial infrastructure for aggregating descriptive information on all living biodiversity, the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL, http://www.eol.org) is undergoing a major transformation in order to better serve scientific discovery.  In this computer demonstration, we show our progress on pilot implementation for marine biodiversity and other use cases.

Initial attributes include but are not limited to numeric data such as body size and longevity, controlled vocabularies such as habitat classifications, and relations such as ecological interactions among taxa.

Data on a new "Data" tab on each EOL taxon page is sourced both from external providers and through direct addition to EOL. Core information is managed using Virtuoso, although some metadata will be handled in our existing relational database.  We establish high-level integration via EOL's taxonomic names infrastructure and TDWG Species Profile Model terms, preserving (or in some cases, creating new terms for) low-level semantics and provenance for offline analysis and deep integration by users. These data will be subject to validation and curation. Users can search for and download all data relevant to particular terms (e.g. all data using a particular habitat term) and eventually all data for topics such as reproduction or physical description, or for data available for a collection of taxa.

The effort is complementary with efforts such as Phenoscape Knowledgebase, and intended to be interoperable with more general semantically-driven platforms such as FreeBase.  It will mobilize and add value to data archived in long-term repositories such as Dryad, to data papers in journals such as the Biodiversity Data Journal, and specimen and observation data. We will leverage text mining and standardization efforts of several pilot projects such as Global Biotic Interactions, (GloBI, http://globalbioticinteractions.wordpress.com/) and Environments-EOL (http://environments-eol.blogspot.com/).

We seek additional use cases and feedback on initial implementation. This significant advance in technology and direction, taken in response to calls from the research and education communities, positions the Encyclopedia of Life to be a key component of Big Data initiatives in evolutionary and ecological science.