wilson@csli.Stanford.EDU (Nathan Wilson) (06/05/90)
I've been wondering if there are any computerized 'guidebooks' to species available. Anything from the equivalent of the Golden Book field guides through scientifically exhastive descriptions of some subset of the biological kingdoms. It seems that it would be wonderful to have at ones fingertips an exhaustive description of all the known species, along with descriptions and photos (when possible) of them. I realize that there are all kinds of problems with this proposal, e.g. the taxonomical system is not set in stone, species is not really a well defined term for all organisms etc, but I would be interested in hear about any attempts that have been or are being made in this regard. Also what kinds of abilities would people like from such a database? Obvious things might be, methods for identification (dichotomous keys drive me nuts sometimes!), where the species is found, has it been successfully domesticated/cultured/bred-in-captivity, what are related species, who discovered the species, all the names for the species (scientific and common in different languages), and cross indexing of all the above. Nathan Wilson Teleos Research nathan%teleos.com@ai.sri.com (PS I'm fairly new to this group so if this has already been discussed please e-mail me a summary. -Thanks)
isaak@imagen.UUCP (Mark Isaak) (06/06/90)
in article <13932@csli.Stanford.EDU>, wilson@csli.Stanford.EDU (Nathan Wilson) says: > > I've been wondering if there are any computerized 'guidebooks' to > species available. I'm also interested in something like this. A simple outline form, listing all species of each genus, all genera under each subfamily, etc., would be enough for me, though other information could be handy. (Probably the most useful additional info would simply be references pointing where to look up the species in literature.) I don't expect to find all species in such a list; beetles alone would probably fill up a couple hard disks. But I'll take whatever I can get. -- Mark Isaak {decwrl,sun}!imagen!isaak or imagen!isaak@decwrl.dec.com "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." - Nietzsche