In a CD of course. And not in 5 years...

There is a strong necessity to have an exhaustive coverage of species. A telephone directory with only 1/100 of the persons is useless.

Science is not only a matter of doing publications to advance careers. It has social implications. If an information of high quality is available on the Net, it will greatly advance the cause of nature conservation. It will also advance the cause of descriptive biology and field biology, and help to raise funds (which go to molecular biology mainly). The paradox is that there is a growing sympathy in the general public for ecology, nature conservation, biodiversity, etc. But at the same time there is growing ignorance in Natural History. However there is a hunger to learn and understand that isn't satisfied by books. But the answers aren't at hand. With current floras and descriptions properly computerized, with the web, and some logic programming and image pattern recognition, we can remedy that.

It seems that descriptive biology needs help from computer scientists, not only database and knowledge management, but also image processing (see other posts about "Types of data").

More on those matters at http://jmvanel.free.fr/ .

Cheers

Jean-Marc Vanel