Welcome to the IdentifyLife and Key to All Life project wiki

IdentifyLife is a collaborative platform for handling biological identification keys and other descriptive resources. IdentifyLife has three main components - Keys Central, My IdentifyLife and the Key to All Life.

Keys Central is a global index and repository for web-based identification tools. Users can search Keys Central to find suitable identification keys for particular groups of taxa in defined areas. The Keys Central index is crowd-sourced - anyone can add a key to the index by filling in a short metadata form.

My IdentifyLife is a collaboration space for taxonomists and other experts who work with descriptive data for groups of organisms. My IdentifyLife is a personal IdentifyLife Home page for registered users, where IdentifyLife contributions can be monitored and projects managed. Two main types of projects that can be created and managed from My IdentifyLife are Standard Lists and Interactive Keys. Standard Lists are community-agreed, collaboratively edited standardised lists of descriptors for a given group of organisms. Interactive Keys are identification tools based on descriptive data coded against a standard list of characters.

The Key to All Life is an ambitious project that aims to create, over time, an identification key to all the world's living organisms. It will be able to accommodate and integrate identification data from a wide range of sources.

This wiki provides access to planning and implementation documentation and to technical specifications for the IdentifyLife project. It will principally be of interest for collaborating developers and those with an interest in the informatics behind IdentifyLife.

Please use the following links to access more information.