[tdwg-tag] State of biodiversity services

[Roderic Page]

The rather frail nature of biodiversity services (some of the major  
players have had service breaks in the last few weeks) has prompted me  
to revisit Dave Vieglais's BigDig and extend it to other services,  
such as uBio, EOL, and TreeBASE, as well as DSpace repositories and  
tools such as Connotea.

The result is at http://bioguid.info/status/ . The idea is to poll  
each service once an hour to see if it is online. Eventually I hope to  
draw some graphs for each service, to get some idea of how reliable it  
is.

Much of my own work depends on using web sites and services, and I'm  
constantly frustrated when they go offline (some times for months at a  
time).

My aim is to be constructive. I well aware that reliability is not  
easy, and some tools that I've developed have disappeared. But I think  
as a community we need to do a lot better if biodiversity informatics  
is to deliver on its promise.

The list of service is biased by what I use. I'm also aware that some  
of the DiGIR provider information is out of date (I basically lifted  
the list from the BigDig, I'll try and edit this as time allows).

Comments (and requests for services to be added) are welcome. There is  
a comment box at the bottom of the web page.

Regards

Rod




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Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
DEEB, FBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Tel: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792
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Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html