Re: Re: Package proposal Science_Weather

On 22 Aug 2003 at 10:23, lists@zyanka.li wrote: > > > Alexander Wirtz wrote: > > > > I wrote a small class which retreives XML data from weather.com. > > > > > > Is the weather.com data free, or would you only be able to use > > > this class if you subscribe to it? METAR data is public domain > > > from the National Weather Service (www.weather.gov). Is there a > > > more specific name for this package that would allow for another > > > weather package that processes METAR? Science_Weather and > > > Science_METAR could work, but maybe someone else has another > > > suggestion before it's too late to change the name? > > Ok, the problem is that METAR has a much more coarse weather-grid, > because it only represents the weather-data gathered at airports, and > not even at everyone, but only at larger ports with data-uplinks... > figures. Also it's not XML used there, but a proprietary > data-representation, no big deal. That's why I suggested implementing several services. Everybody can decide on his own if he wants to use METAR (because it suits his needs) or weather.com or something which isn't implemented yet. Depends on which data you need. E.g. if METAR is more up-to-date than weather.com, although it has less measurement-points, you could choose METAR - no problem with that. > On the other hand, weather.com is free for registered people _and_ for > open-source software, providing that data. Please see > http://download.weather.com/web/xml/sdk.zip > for further details... it's a pdf included there. Oh, didn't know. Interesting! > > [...] > > How about a class Science_Weather as a wrapped / interface for all > > weather-services - defining a common data structure etc. And then we > > might have classes Science_Weather_METAR as well as > > Science_Weather_WheaterDotCom as interfaces to the actual services. > > Ok, as you brought up that topic, I'm willing to write a framework for > at least weather.com and METAR, I also saw another provider for > weather XML data, but this website was non existent, so I didn't > followup'ed. I can't remember the url unfortunately :-( But it doesn't matter ... > > I've seen another free service on the web, but can't remember it's > > name at the moment. They offer weather-data for free via XML-feeds. > > And maybe there are also regional weather-sites that are of interest > > to some people. So I think a general Science_Weather as an interface > > would be another solution. And all Weather-classes should be bundled > > in a common package. > > To me the system would work as e.g. Cache, one main class and a > Weather/ directory containing the multiple services, so everything > would be kept in one package. Having a cache for high-frequency-websites makes sense, yes. If you could work out a first proposal I'll have a look at it. To the others: what do you think about the proposal? This way we don't rely on any specific weather-reporting-service ... Stefan