The massive development of biodiversity-related information systems on the Internet has created much that appears exciting but chaotic, a diversity to match biodiversity itself. This richness and the arrays of new sources are counterbalanced by the maddening difficulty in knowing what is where, or of comparing like with like. But quietly, behind the first waves of exuberance, biologists and computer scientists have started to pull together in a rising tide of coherence and organization. The fledgling field of biodiversity informatics looks set to deliver major advances that could turn the Internet into a giant global biodiversity information system.