Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems

The Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS) is a grand collection of nearly 600 e-book volumes carrying thematically organized and peer reviewed state-of-the-art content in hundreds of subjects related to science of sustainable development. It has been created with the contributions from thousands of renowned scholars from more than 100 countries. EOLSS is an integrated compendium of 21 component encyclopedias on the following branches:

This is one of the largest community oriented encyclopedia creation projects of the world. The way the encyclopedia is being compiled can be defined as crowdsourcing, where intellectuals from all over the world and across various institutions are contributing. However, the encyclopedia relies on strict standards of peer review and can be referred to for academic purposes as well. The EOLSS is a projected that has transformed into a large semantic knowledge management tool with active participation and assistance from the UNESCO. UNESCO and EOLSS, the two organizations, have established a joint secretariat to manage and monitor the encyclopedia in progress. The establishment is located in Paris and it defines itself as "A Non-profit Global effort being managed by different organizations" (EOLSS, 2013). It has got a publishing wing as well which specializes in publishing various materials such as books, e-books, scholarly subscriptions, etc.

The portal of EOLSS receives maximum hits from USA and India. If each hit is assumed to originate from one unique user, then USA has about 19% and India has about 16% of the users of this web portal. The number of hits falls dramatically after we consider USA and India, whereas countries like Australia, Canada, and UK each contribute almost about 5% of the total hits. This shows that people familiar with English are feeling more comfortable in utilizing this project for their educational or knowledge seeking purposes and researches. The statistics are updated as of January 2014.

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