Over the last twenty years, biologists have become increasingly aware that knowledge of the shape of the Tree of Life, along whose branches genetic information has flowed for over three billion years, is critical for understanding the diversity of life and how the characteristics of organisms have arisen. There has been a recent explosion of information about these evolutionary relationships, spurred both by advances in gathering the evidence required for such inferences (including the current ease of molecular sequencing) and in analytical methods for inferring phylogenies from such data. The extent of the information and its value has led to the new field of phyloinformatics. Management of phylogenetic results can take the form of databases of raw results, or secondary databases synthesized in various ways.

In this talk, we will give an overview of phyloinformatics efforts underway or envisaged, including both primary (e.g., TreeBase) and secondary (e.g., created automatically via supertree algorithms) databases. We will then focus on the Tree of Life Web Project, a secondary database that uses experts to synthesize and present information about the phylogeny of life and the characteristics of groups of organisms. The Tree of Life Web Project contains information about thousands of branches and leaves of the Tree of Life, authored by over 300 biologists from 21 countries. Its audience ranges from biodiversity researchers to school children. In part to satisfy this diverse group of users, and in part to enable connection with other analytical tools and other databases, the project is currently being transformed into a more sophisticated database-driven system.