Biodiversity Service Status

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 myself 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 I'm also aware that some of the DiGIR provider information is out of date (I basically lifted the list from the BigDig, I'll try and edit this as time allows).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 adding services) are welcome. There is a comment box at the bottom of the web page, which uses Disqus, a very cool comment system that enables you to keep track of your comments across multiple sites. It also supports OpenID.