[Taxacom] State of biodiversity services

[Jim Croft]

Thanks Rod. This is at once both interesting an alarming.  The
fragility of the interweb is not something we are unaware of but this
is a graphic demonstration that it is is happening in our own back
yard.  And on a not insignificant scale.

What it demonstrates is that both of the common models we use for
on-line information management are not robust enough for serious
business and are probably not sustainable.  The monolithic
provider/harvester fails catastrophically when the central server goes
off line and the distributed model fails partially when one of the
components goes off line.

Eggs in one basket or spreading them over many baskets is not the
issue.  They are still eggs and some *will* break.  We can not expect
not  to have access to all the eggs we need and still to be taken
seriously. What we need to do is multiply the number of eggs and
baskets so it does not matter if we lose a few - eggs or baskets...

The design implications of this seem obvious - sole supplier models,
even mashups of sole suppliers are not going to work.  Broad scale
duplication and design redundancy is probably the only solution.  A
global equivalent of a rack of hot-swappable RAIDed disks comes to
mind.  Google does it, the filesharers do it.  We probably can't avoid
it...

Interesting stuff...  I had no idea we were quite so flaky...  :)

jim

On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 5:44 AM, Roderic Page <r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk> wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> 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
> AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
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> Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
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-- 
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Jim Croft ~ jim.croft at gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499

"Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality."
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