A few weeks ago I went quiet for a week while I attended a workshop at the Met Office. We called our workshop “the lock-in”, as the original proposal was that we would be fed pizzas through a locked door until we came out with a GML application schema for operational meteorology. Well, we were allowed out, but being the Met Office we had no effective internet connection, and we were too knackered for anything in the evenings …

Anyway, the important thing is that we had a really excellent week, and made some real progress on a number of issues. The results are summarised in the Exeter Communique (pdf):

This document summarises the discussions and recommendations of a workshop convened by the UK Met Office to examine the application of OGC Web Services and GML Modelling to Operational Meteorology. The workshop addressed the need to define best practice for development of data standards that span multiple subject domains, jurisdictions and processing technologies. The findings of this workshop will be of use not only to organisations involved in the processing of meteorological data, but any community that requires interoperability along a data processing chain.

Further information is at the AUKEGGS[^1] wikipage. [^1]: Australia-UK collaboration on Exploitation of Grid and Geospatial Standards

comments (2)

Beth Ebert (on Friday 05 October, 2007)

Hi Bryan,

I stumbled on this page this afternoon when googling on “GML meteorology”. The AUKEGGS workshop sounds really good, and very relevant to work we want to do at the Bureau of Meteorology. We want to encode tropical cyclone tracks (analyses, forecasts, NWP incl. EPS) in XML, and it looks like GML might be the right way to go. Did you guys try it? Do you think it would be very difficult?

Any comments appreciated!

Beth Ebert Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre e.ebert@bom.gov.au

Bryan (on Thursday 18 October, 2007)

We should have got back to you via email, but for the public record: we didn’t try it, but indeed it’s an obvious extension! Difficult? Well, not particularly difficult, what may be interesting is working out what tools can exploit the information.