The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL - http://mbl.edu) is an international center for research, education, and training in biology. The oldest private marine laboratory in the country, the MBL currently supports a year-round staff of more than 275 scientists and support staff working in such fields as cell and developmental biology, ecology, microbiology, molecular evolution, global infectious disease, informatics, neurobiology, and sensory physiology. The Biodiversity Informatics Group at the MBL is creating the software behind the Encylopedia of Life (EOL - http://eol.org) - a single portal providing information on all 1.9 million known species. The infrastructure is seamlessly aggregating data from thousands of sites into species pages in the Encyclopedia using novel informatics tools to capture, organize, and reshape knowledge about biodiversity. The group collaborates with data providers. The information is then indexed and recombined for expert and non-expert users alike using aggregation technology to bring together different data elements from remote sites. All of the code related to the EOL is open source and available via Google Code ( http://code.google.com/p/eol-website/ ) or GitHub ( http://github.com/eol/eol ).