The first 30,000 pages of an online "Encyclopedia of Life" — what its designers hope will become the most comprehensive catalogue of all 1.8 million known species — is scheduled to be unveiled Wednesday at the annual TED conference.

Harvard emeritus professor E.O. Wilson articulated the need for the encyclopedia in a widely read essay in 2003. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation gave him a $10 million grant to start the project, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation added $2.5 million. Last year, Wilson won a TED Prize, which added $100,000 and the technical assistance of TED members like the Web design firm Avenue A/Razorfish.

In a statement, Wilson predicted the encyclopedia would have "a profound and creative effect" on in science.

"It aims not only to summarize all that we know of Earth's life forms, but also to accelerate the discovery of the vast array that remain unknown," he said. "This great effort promises to lay out new directions for research in every branch of biology."

Wilson and others behind the encyclopedia said they hope that assembling all this information in one place will give scientists and others a better overall picture of what's left of the world's biodiversity.

The encyclopedia has so far created placeholder pages for 1 million species, thanks in large part to its collaboration with two similar projects, the Catalogue of Life and Tree of Life.

Compilers have assembled detailed information for 30,000 of those pages, borrowing from what it described as "comprehensive, authoritative" sources like FishBase, AmphibiaWeb, and Solanaceae Source. They have also built about two dozen multimedia pages to give a sense of the rich content planned for most of the website.

Encyclopedia designers said they'll post the first 30,000 pages to attract user feedback that they will use in designing the rest of the site. All 1.8 million pages are scheduled to be finished by 2017.

by Mark Stein