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Climate Data - An XML/XQuery implementation

Introduction

The UK Met Office recently released the temperature records for about 1600 stations world-wide. Each station record is available online as a text file, for example Stornoway.

It is expected that longer-term, the MET office itself will make the data available in more readily progammable format. In the meantime, this site offers a number of XML-based resources for access to the data.

WMO station data

Additional station data is obtained from the WMO's station list.

• All 11000 WMO stations converted to XML

Station data

The station data and temperature record is available in two forms:

• As XML e.g. http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/xmlwiki/Climate/station.xq?station=030260
• As HTML, with charts rendered using the Google Visualization API e.g. http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/xmlwiki/Climate/station.xq?station=030260&render=HTML.
• The range of the data dispayed can be restricted with additional parameters. http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/xmlwiki/Climate/station.xq?station=030260&render=HTML&start=1950&end=2000

Indexes

linked to station records

• Country index
• Google Map
• Raw data:XML KML

Implementation

The implementation of the conversion from text to XML and presentation of the data is described in a case study in the XQuery Wikibook.

This work has been developed by Chris Wallace with assistance from Dave Challender.

Further work is planned, particularly the implementation of resource URIs and representation as RDF.