Wireframe markup language?

A technical question we need to settle early is in what format should the wireframe of the tree be released (under Creative Commons) so as to allow anyone who wants to render it up for their own uses? We will be paying someone commercially to make up a broadcast version, but want it to be as widely useful as possible. I'll blog more later on chronograms, and of course there would be data associated with each node, but I still think we need feedback from the biology and the graphics communities on what would be best.

Using a real tree

This version for the Smithsonian eschews biological plausibility in favour of a more familiar visual reference.

Darwin's sketch

One early version of the tree from a significant proponent.

Reconstructing the tree of life

This is a reasonably comprehensible article about the maths behind phylogenetics. As it puts it "The big question is how to infer the correct evolutionary tree from observed data."

Adobe stuff

EoL have been doing some interesting collaborative work with Adobe on visualisations of the tree. (Unrelatedly Gever Tulley has also got some provocative things to say about child safety.)

Clickthrough from video

There are a couple of examples of the kind of technology we might want to employ from the commercial sector in this french Adidas commercial where you can click on a player to see his biog. Here's more from livelink video and Asterpix.

The vision

This is an international collaborative project to produce a mainstream broadcastable animation of about four minutes duration. It will derive from a biologically plausible tree of life and include image of various species. A flash version is also planned which will allow click-throughs to web pages such as encyclopaedia of life. The whole thing will be made available under creative commons.