Imagine: Life on the Planet, a Complete History on the Web!

This article describes a workshop held on Biodiversity Informatics in Pune, India which explored ways to get a comprehensive, global catalogue of the world's bidiversity online. The vision as described by Venkatraman is "a future where a global warning
system alerts farmers on a possible invasion by crop-killing pests," or "an ecosystem is saved before a super-highway is constructed," or "an area is identified by forest officials as a wildlife sanctuary before it’s too late."

The discussion focused on potential collaboration in digitising biodiversity information on a comprehensive, global scale. The workshop was attended by Indian and American delegates specialising in both Information Technology (IT) and biodiversity and was hosted by The National Chemical Laboratory (NCL).

As described by one participant, Michael Ruggiero, "It’s been almost 200 years of naming species all over the world..." and the data has not yet been digitised. The same species are identified by different names in various parts of the world and a

collaborative project would seek to pull this information together. Part of the purpose of this project would be to make the data

available to experts who are specifically seeking to identify endangered and invasive species. As described by one person at the

workshop, "there is a lot of information, but it’s locked up in cupboards...The challenge is to open these cupboards."

The NCL Centre for Biodiversity Informatics (NCBI) in India is described as having put together a website that includes over 90,000 entries on fauna along with 48,000 synonyms and 15,078 common names.