Encyclopedia of Life

The Encyclopedia of Life is a project that proposes to catalogue all of Earth's 1.8 million species and make them available via the web.

...will include species descriptions, pictures, maps, videos, sound, sightings by amateurs, and links to entire genomes and scientific journal papers.

Sounds like a huge, but worthwhile project.  I wonder what encoding they will use for species, and what services/API's they might make available?  I can imagine some useful linking that could be done between scientific papers, references within this database, and publisher and library services that could make good use of this set of data.

- via Digg, via Daily News