Weather Data Available in XML

wombatmobile writes "Wired reports the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this week began providing weather data in an open access XML format. Previously, the data was technically available to the public, but in a format that's not easily deciphered. How will the free and easy availability of valuable data like this in XML affect the development of the web? One example is Tom Groves SVG weather. This type of visualization of XML data is about to fall within easy reach with nothing more than a text editor required as an authoring tool. From March 2005 SVG becomes part of the standard Mozilla/FireFox build. As an example of how web standards are supposed to work, what more could you hope to find?" We mentioned the policy change a few days ago.

Comments

Weather Market

[Doc Ruby]

I want to see independent organizations datamining the NOAA weather data, running their own models, and making competing predictions. Then I want to see metaminers generating comparative "batting averages", keyed to current conditions, and get my weather forecasts from a client which knows which service is better at predicting the next few days/weeks/months starting with current conditions. That will give weather stenographers like the Weather Channel, and their TV news echo chamber, a real run for their money. Forecast@Home, anyone?

Re:Why SOAP

[jdludlow]

SOAP uses HTTP as a transport layer option (usually). The reason why the added complexity is worth it is because it allows client applications to do things like "float temp = weatherSerivce.getTemp(cityID);" much more easily. (Note: I completely made up that example, but it's similar to what would actually be used.) The point is that the client doesn't really have to know and/or care that "weatherService" isn't a local call. The client also doesn't need to care that it's running Java locally and the server is running .NET (or whatever else it might be using).

SOAP is just a piece of the larger and much more complicated Web Services unbrella. Understanding all of the specs involved is a huge task, but you can do some client-side tutorials that will explain quite a bit of the basics anyway. Most of the real work is done on the server, so if you ignore that bit of it to start with, the learning curve isn't anywhere near as steep. The Apache Axis project is a decent starting point, if you just want to play around with the technology. Installing Axis into Tomcat is about a minutes worth of effort, then you can spend hours exploring the various documents, examples, and tutorials.