[Foundation-l] Proposal for Wikimedia Weather

[John at Darkstar]

Wikimedia Norway have had a meeting with Meteorologisk Institutt
(http://met.no) in Norway about using the dataset published by the
institute. Today the dataset is used for the service Yr.no
(http://yr.no), a joint venture between them and Norwegian Broadcasting
Corporation (http://nrk.no). Met said it would be pleased if the data
could be utilized somehow, later this was confirmed by NRK.

The dataset is localized to within 4km in Norway and updated in about 4
hour cycles. There are available lookup for 7.5 million places around
the world, and 700 000 places in Norway. Base data are the HIRLAM model
(High Resolution Limited Area Model) and the EC model from The European
Weathercenter ECWMF. HIRLAM has 10 km resolution of the grid. When
requesting data for named places the data from the grid is interpolated
to build the new weather forecast.

The dataset is made available with an open license, they request
attribution and "truthful reproduction", basically you can't say it is
from Met and falsify the dataset. You can't add a few degrees to make
the weather look better at a certain place and still claim its sourced
from Met. This is analogous to editing a news photo at Commons so its
not a truthful reproduction of the event anymore. There are one
disclaimer for sites with pornographic or racist content which may be
troublesome for a CC-by-sa -licensed site. They do although allow use on
commercial sites. Other than that the licensing should be given due
consideration.

My personal opinion is that they should be kindly asked to make the
dataset available according to CC-by-sa to make reuse easier.

Our proposal to Met/NRK was to make an extension that could be localized
for various languages, based on the XML-data streamed from their site,
and to use something like this for Wikinews. Unfortunately we have not
been able to get sufficient funding for the project. We also need some
backing from the community if this should be considered a viable project.

Short information in english about Yr.no
http://www.yr.no/english/1.2025949

Page about licensing (in Norwegian)
http://www.yr.no/verdata/1.3321307

Page about services available (in Norwegian)
http://www.yr.no/verdata/

Some locations
http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Oslo/Oslo/
http://www.yr.no/place/Bouvet_Island/
http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Finnmark/B%C3%A5tsfjord/Makkaur/
http://www.yr.no/place/United_States/New_York/New_York~5128581/
http://www.yr.no/place/China/Xinjiang/%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi/
Page about how the weather forecast is made (in Norwegian)
http://www.yr.no/informasjon/1.3687572

John Erling Blad
Wikimedia Norway

Tris Thomas wrote:
> Dear All,
> I don't know whether this has been discussed before, apologies if it has.
> 
> I'm interested in people's thoughts on a new Wikimedia project-maybe 
> WikiWeather, which basically would do what it says on the tin.  Along 
> with importing national weather from other sources(especially to begin 
> with), contributors could then put their weather where they are.  This 
> could evolve into many contributors giving very localised weather 
> forecasts worldwide, which could be used by many of the other projects 
> and anybody else.
> 
> Would people be interested in this proposal/have any thoughts on it?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Wikinews User Page <http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Tristan%20Thomas>
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