Weather XML, the new frontier?
Today my quest has been to find some standards for disseminating weather data over the web. My initial reaction is, of course, that RSS would be a perfect fit! Technically we’d need to extend RSS to handle the weather data in XML format, but the basis is there. We just need to receive the weather anytime a sensor changes and display it to the user.
The National Weather Service along with NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) have put up an “Experimental” XML site. From here I can grab an RSS 2.0 feed or a CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) feed. Now CAP is interesting because it was very recently approved by OASIS as a standard.
To my point… CAP seems to be a great standard for Weather Alerts, but what about normal weather data? If I just want to know the wind speed / temp / humidity / etc, then where’s the Weather XML standard? I found a couple posts about WeatherML but that was from 2000 and looked abandoned. I’d like our sensors to output a standard markup, but only if we can find one. We just might have to right our own schema for this. Any ideas?