[jdev] Re: weather data over Jabber

[Trejkaz Xaoza]

Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> It seems that the (U.S.) National Weather Service has defined an open
> XML format for weather data:
>
> http://www.nws.noaa.gov/forecasts/xml/
>
> Perhaps a JEP (or some experimentation) is in order....

Some thought has been done on the matter.  jabber.zim.net.au is the only 
server I know of which actually runs a weather agent, and I've been thinking 
of improving it for some time now.

Part of the problem with the existing XML weather formats is that there are 
four of the damn things now, and that's just in the US.  The other problem is 
that their formats are completely unusable for our simpler needs, due to 
complexity.  Seriously, have a look at this file and tell me how comfortable 
you'd be sending it around XMPP:

    http://www.nws.noaa.gov/forecasts/xml/DWMLgen/schema/latest_DWML.txt

Wouldn't something like this be better?

    <!-- Current conditions -->
    <cc xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/weather">
      <temp>25</temp>
      ...
    </cc>

    <!-- Forecast -->
    <fc xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/weather"
        date="...">
      <mintemp>15</mintemp>
      <maxtemp>30</maxtemp>
    </fc>

In any case, I have a basic script banged together for the publishing end and 
the subscribing end.  These are the tiers which would be implemented if 
everyone in the world were cooperative: ;-)

   Relating to current conditions:

   1. Have a bot routinely downloading from weather.com or some similarly
      comprehensive weather site (weather.com have an XML format as well),
      and push this data through pubsub.

   2. Have "free" weather stations grab data from a weather station using
      something like Open2300, publishing straight to pubsub.

   Relating to forecasts:

   1. Have a bot routinely downloading from weather.com or some similarly
      comprehensive weather site (weather.com have an XML format as well),
      and push this data through pubsub.

   2. Have a bot subscribing to current conditions, which aggregates the
      past conditions and uses them to calculate the forecasts.  The
      results would be pushed back up into a different pubsub channel.

Keeping the two separate is nice because not everyone gives a wet toss about 
forecasts, and this way you can subscribe to either, or both.

So we need two data elements, one for current conditions and one for 
forecasts, of which quite a few elements or datatypes will overlap.  PubSub 
is the easy choice for how to push them around, the more interesting thing I 
can see in such a thing is how users will find the right PubSub feed.  
Presumably you'd use service discovery and break down all the data by region, 
so the user could browse into Oceania -> Australia -> New South Wales -> ...

TX


-- 
             Email: Trejkaz Xaoza <trejkaz at trypticon.org>
          Web site: http://xaoza.net/
         Jabber ID: trejkaz at jabber.zim.net.au
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