Scientists are going to release a Encyclopedia of Life that will have the record of all the animals and plants till date discovered.  The project tries to add 1.8 million known plant and animal species.  Each will have their own web page in an online archive that includes:

1. Photographs.
2. Genetic information.
3. Distribution maps.

In this week,  30,000 pages of the project will be released, which will focus on:

1. Fish.
2. Amphibia.
3. Birds.
4. Large mammals.

This is just a small percentage but the scientists feel happy about the project!  Robert May is a former president of Royal Society thinks this will help them sort species and have a database. 

Wikipedia has started this project with the “mash-up” software to aggregate large amounts of data.  The following institutes are helping Wikipedia.  They are:

1. Natural History Museum of London.
2. Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.
3. Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

A team is working quite hard!  They have already scanned 2.5 million pages of academic journals, drawing and photographs  have been scanned.

The science of classification began with Carl Linnaeus in 1735.  He had promised to classify all know living thing.  By the time he reached his 13^th and final edition, his original 11 pages expanded to 3000 and it is still incomplete!!