Introduction

From http://www.catalogueoflife.org/info_about_col.php:

The Species 2000 & ITIS Catalogue of Life is planned to become a comprehensive catalogue of all known species of organisms on Earth by the year 2011. Rapid progress has been made recently and this, the eighth edition of the Annual Checklist, contains 1,105,589 species.

Experiments

Treemap

A treemap visualisation of the 2008 Catalogue of Life is online at http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/tm/. For more details see http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2008/06/catalogue-of-life-as-treemap.html. The PHP code is here: http://code.google.com/p/iphylo/source/browse/trunk/data/col/tm/index.php