iSpecies Mashup

Page R (2010), Ispecies, Glasgow, Scot., viewed 28 March 2010, http://ispecies.org/

This mashup was developed by Professor Roderick Page who works in the Faculty of Biomedical and Life Science at the University of Glasgow. iSpecies is a great example of a science "mashup" that uses various sites to make a separate information web page for each species. The data displayed is generated "on the fly" by querying other data sources. The main home page is very simple just a search field and a cloud of the last 20 species search terms.
For each query term iSpecies provides a definition from Wikipedia, genome information from NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information), up to five images from Yahoo, a species distribution map from GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), and relevant article links from Google Scholar. Where availbale the iSpecies will also give links to authoritive sites like
Catalog of Life
Encyclopedia of life
Animal Diversity Web
Mammal Species of the World
Integrated Taxonomic Information System
Arctos Specimen Database

Although this is a scientific site you can search using the common name or the Latin classification but there isn't any spell check or suggestion mode, so if you don't have the name exactly correct you won't come up with any results. This site makes a great starting point for anyone conducting research into any of the world’s species. You can retrieve a great deal of pertinent information about the species in question from the one site. Occaisionally the site will get tricked and an unrelated image will be displayed usually because of an amibiguous tag.

Here is an example of a search result for Sarcophilus harrisii (Tasmanian Devil).