Mon 24 July 2006
A few months back I posted a link to my ten favorite Web Mapping Services. The post included live links directly to the WMS servers. At first I questioned this move as locally hosted images would be far more reliable. But I thought it would be a neat experiment to see the downtime of each site. So I checked it daily just out of curiosity...
Well with today's apparent disappearance of the NASA JPL site, all but one of my WMS layers mentioned have been down for at least a significant portion of a day. (The only one that's been consitently up has been http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu) .
This echos back to what I was complaining about with the whole USGS National Map debacle. The bottom line is that whenever we rely heavily on a web service to deliver essential data, we are risking the integrity of the end product. The chain is only as strong as it's weakest link and, unfortunately as the USGS and NASA have shown, those links can and will fail completely from time to time.