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eftychia: Spaceship superimposed on a whirling vortex (departure)
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Field Guide To Everything Not Tiny

posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 07:27pm on 2008-06-03

I wonder how much storage space would be required for a dichotomous key covering all currently known macroscopic plant and animal species. Could you fit it in your pocket on flash memory, or would ultra high density optical storage ("about ten years away from being a commercial product" every time I hear about it) be required?

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There are 4 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
zenlizard: Because the current occupation is fascist. (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] zenlizard at 12:39am on 2008-06-04
http://tolweb.org/tree/phylogeny.html

I have the site saved on my comptuer, of course.
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posted by [identity profile] browngirl.livejournal.com at 12:49am on 2008-06-04
OK, that's a *magnificent* answer.
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geekosaur: orange tabby with head canted 90 degrees, giving impression of "maybe it'll make more sense if I look at it this way?" (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] geekosaur at 01:10am on 2008-06-04
For some reason I now want a parallel ontology site.
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(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] writerjanice.livejournal.com at 06:58am on 2008-06-16
(dropping a bit late & catching up :-) )

Also, check out this site http://www.discoverlife.org/

My spouse is a taxonomic botanist and has worked on some of these types of problems. The real question is, how much detail do you want to cover in the key? Do you want to stick strictly to data that can be gathered without doing DNA analysis, or include DNA workups? What about territory/range data for species? Images of typical and atypical specimens?

I know that 5 or 6 years ago, when we jointly looked at some ideas, a fairly detailed physical key for several species, along with images and the java engine would fit in reasonable mid-range Palm PDA...

By the by, there is on-going work on defining the XML language used to describe such keys, completely.
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