Connecting millions of data points in a graph database

Creating ‘Facebook’ for species

The Open Tree of Life database is not just a list with about two million species. Information is added about their special characteristics and possible relationships with others as well. “It may become tens or hundreds of million pieces of data when we are all done.”

Stephen Smith, an evolutionary biology professor at the University of Michigan, is working together with the other researchers of the Open Tree of Life project to develop the programs and tools that will be used to construct the full tree of life. Scientists from all over the world can then synthesize all the information in the database.

“We are currently building the back-end of the Open Tree of Life. We need to create software that allows us to put all our information in a graph network, so that we can easily retrieve the information that researchers are specifically looking for.” (more…)

February 26, 2013 | Categories: Building Open Tree, We need your help! | Tags: #opentree, community, database, digital data, evolutionary biology, evolutionary trees, Facebook, graph, graph database, graph search, neo4j, network, open data, open science, open tree, open tree of life, phylogeny, social media, social network, species, synthesis, tree of evolution, tree of life species, Twitter, What is the Tree of Life | 3 Comments