A single-source catalogue of every one of the 1.8 million or more life forms on Earth, the Encyclopedia of Life will involve a network of some of the world’s most prestigious scientific institutions.

But the encyclopedia, which went online for the first time this week, will depend heavily for its success on people — like Allan Keith, citizen scientist of Chilmark — with little or no formal training.

The goals of the project are enormously ambitious. The aim is not just to record the names of all living things, an idea which has been around since Carolus Linneaus, the father of taxonomy, first published his Systema Naturae in 1735. But also to make them identifiable to anyone with any level of interest, to facilitate study of life by region and to trace its shifting distribution under the influence of human habitation and climate change.

And that is where people like Mr. Keith come in. For, said Dr. David J. Patterson, professor of biology and senior scientist at the Josephine Bay Paul Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, and one of the prime movers of the Encyclopedia of Life, this endeavor is just way too big to succeed solely on the endeavors of the relatively few credentialed experts.

His point is underscored by his surroundings. As he talked about the scale of the project, the scientist was sitting in his somewhat pokey office in a converted house in Woods Hole, which is occupied by six coworkers.

There are other little cells of people working on the encyclopedia elsewhere, of course, but none larger than this. It is the fact of several recent technological advances of the Internet over recent years which make the task possible.

“Until very recently it wasn’t feasible, but in the last few years things have happened that have made the concept of an Encyclopedia of Life quite tractable,” he said.

“One thing that’s happened is the emergence of communal enterprises on the Internet. Things like Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, environments that allow anyone in the world to contribute content. It gives us a new way of overcoming the difficulties of just getting all the labor together.”

Of those, Wikipedia, the online general encyclopedia, which allows anyone to post information which is then checked and verified by experts, is the most pertinent example, he said.

“There was a report in the journal Nature recently, which compared Wikipedia with Britannica and it came out equal or ahead. So the wisdom of the masses . . . ends up creating a very good structure,” he said.

“There’s an enormous number of citizen scientists who have an understanding of the world, but it has been kind of locked out in a sense,” he said. “The professional scientists have a way through publications to communicate what they’re doing. The hope is that EOL by participatory will allow others to invest their knowledge and then re-express it through EOL.”

Another vital development was the huge expansion in the bandwidth of the Internet, which now allows images to move freely.

“That was important because biology is a very image-rich discipline. You need to see the pictures of the organisms you’re talking about. Imagine a bird book, for example, without any pictures in it. It would be terrible,” Mr. Patterson said.

The third key development, he said, “is something called aggregation technology or mash-up technology, which gives us a mechanism to reach into other Web sites, pull out information we like and recombine it as new Web pages.”

“Here,” Mr. Patterson said, indicating the computer screen beside him, “we have an image, which could be drawn from one person and some text on biology, coming from different sources. This whole thing is being compiled dynamically from lots of different sources simultaneously.

“So one of the things that makes this project realistic is that we don’t have to sit down and rewrite all the text, or take a lot of new photographs. We rely very much on aggregating the content that people have already put together.

“We’ve now got about 40,000 pages up that have images and text, and we can deliver 1.2 million pages, the majority of which have a relatively small amount of information like the name and a couple of links to places like Google. So we’re already in a position to give people an idea of 1.2 million species that are out there.”

Forty thousand pages sounds impressive, until you consider that there are at least a couple of million species out there. But then consider how far the venture has come already in just a few short years.

The idea, Mr. Patterson said, was first championed by the legendary Harvard biologist Edward Osborne Wilson.

“He started talking about a vision of having a Web site you could go to, to find out information about any organism.”

Then, in February last year, Wilson received a Ted prize at the annual Technology, Education, Design conference — an annual event which brings together various thinkers, awards a guest speaker $100,000 and grants them one wish. His was for the Encyclopedia of Life.

“TED is a venue where several people are given prizes because they have the capacity to change the way that we do things. The delegates attending are provided with a list of things that need to happen to make the wish to be realized. And the Tedsters, companies, foundations and powerful individuals are invited to sign up [to give help].

“So we’ve got about 40 Tedsters, who are willing to help us, including Microsoft and Adobe and a lot of smaller operations.

“In May, various agencies announced their willingness to provide the funds, and in July 2007 the funds started to move.

“The initial funding for the Encyclopedia of life came through two foundations, the MacArthur Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, and there is a group of major institutions acting as the initial custodians of the project and trying to direct it. They include the Smithsonian, Harvard University, Field Museum in Chicago, the Missouri Botanical Gardens, a consortium of international libraries called the Biological Heritage Library and ourselves.

“Each of those institutions has a special role to play. For instance, the BHL is in the process of trying to digitize every book that deals with biodiversity information, that is freed from copyright. The expectation is that could generate as many as half a billion pages of information.

“It is coordinated through the Smithsonian, where the secretariat lives. The botanical gardens acts as the coordinator for plant content. Harvard is home to the outreach activities. Field Museum forms the connection to the research community. We are responsible here for the informatics, the computer foundations for the whole project. It’s our job to create the software that will manage all of this information,” Mr. Patterson said.

The Sloan and MacArthur Foundations have made $12 million available and are willing to put in up to $25 million, assuming the project meets certain benchmarks at the end of the first two years, and each of the cornerstone institutions, of which there are now six, is committed to finding another $5 million.

The next cornerstone institution will be Atlas of Living Australia which is the Australian equivalent of the Encyclopedia of Life, and there is growing interest from other organizations around the world.

“So that’s about $60 million so far,” said Dr. Patterson. “I would expect that we will see at least a $100 million committed to this project.”

The goal is to have a million pages in place by 2012, and Dr. Patterson’s expectation is it will take about 10 years to cover most of the species that are out there.

And at the end of that time, it will be an invaluable tool, on many levels.

For serious scientists, taxonomists like Dr. Patterson, it will speed their work. No need to spend long periods of time hunting down literature or specimens around the world.

Alternatively, students, doing curriculum exercises on the life forms on Martha’s Vineyard, for example, can filter it so just those species come up, and enter information on what they find.

Or some amateur, keen to identify a plant, can simply enter some information. A plant on Martha’s Vineyard, 12 inches high, with yellow flowers in May. And up will come three or four photographs.

Dr. Patterson sees it as part of the process of correcting the growing distance between increasingly urbanized people and nature.

“A big part of that, in my view, is to be able to look at things and say ‘I know what that is.’ That process of being able to identify species is absolutely critical to their sense of being part of this world around them.”

Which brings us back to Allan Keith, who is now in the final stages of producing a book — an old-fashioned book, intended for scientific rather than general use — which catalogues all the life forms (save microbes) living on this Island.

And by tapping into such work by citizen scientists that the Encyclopedia of Life will become flexible enough to be used at the micro-level of a single small Island in a large world.

“What this gentleman here has been doing,” said Dr. Patterson, gesturing to Mr. Keith, sitting across the desk in his small office, “is giving us this device we can use to convert this encyclopedia of all life into an encyclopedia of Martha’s Vineyard life.”

Beyond that, the encyclopedia can serve as a tool for analyzing changes in the natural world.

“Another thing that can come out of it is information to measure global warming or invasive species or distribution of endangered species. So the same infrastructure cane be used to play many different roles in many different places,” Mr. Patterson said.

The Encyclopedia of Life can change the way the world does biology, from something which historically was very local, into something global. And back again.

Said Mr. Patterson: “We are looking at the start of a new phase in biology, that is very grand.”