SpaceTrees were developed at Maryland's HCIL lab, and that lab has applied them to biodiversity informatics. The LepTree project has also used them (see LepTaxonTree). I've not been a huge fan, mainly because the existing implementation is a stand-alone Java program, which somewhat limits it's utility. But JIT changes all that.
To get a sense of whether SpaceTrees would be useful, I took Belmonte's second SpaceTree example as a starting point. In this example, nodes are created on demand (rather than loading the entire tree into memory). It proved relatively straightforward (after getting my head around making Ajax requests using Mootools) to modify the example to load nodes from a local copy of the Catalogue of Life 2008 classification.
I've put a live version of the Catalogue of Life SpaceTree up at http://bioguid.info/demos/spacetree. It doesn't do much, beyond display the tree, together with some basic information about the node. But I think it shows the power of Javacsript to create pleasing visualisations, and the potential of SpaceTrees as a simple tool to browse large taxonomic classifications.
