In June 2004, the National Weather Service (NWS) deployed a web service to disseminate National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) data. The web service used the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard known as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) for the service's messaging framework and an NWS-developed Extensible Markup Language (XML) dialect called Digital Weather Markup Language (DWML). In May 2007, the NWS unveiled a second web service for sharing NDFD data, this one based on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Feature Service (WFS) standard. The NDFD WFS was introduced to better support the digital data needs of customers and partners particularly those in the emergency management community. The NDFD SOAP service, despite its use of a one-of-a-kind flavor of XML, has been well received and supports 1.7 million accesses each day while the NDFD WFS has been largely ignored receiving on average only 90 accesses per day.

To explore why this usage disparity exists and the implications of that analysis for the weather community as it works to build cyber infrastructure, we examine the factors, such as maturity and ease of use, that can drive users to embrace or reject a particular data dissemination standard. We show user preference for one standard over another by revealing user access patterns of both services to include how often users access the service, how long they remain users, and how much data they request with each visit. By understanding the implications of choosing an internet data dissemination standard, the weather community will be better prepared to build cyber infrastructure in support of challenges facing, among others, urban planners.