[Wikinews-l] Weather bot

Thu Jun 18 15:07:15 UTC 2009

If you go up a page from Milos' detailed list there's a world map with
temperatures. This looks very like the old WeatherChecker output but I think
it's really overlaid temp. numbers. The whole thing looks really good, but
pictorial form is what most people are used to digesting weather data in.

How hard is it to convert these detailed figures into a map system that uses
image maps and can be drilled down into a more local form?

I'd expect to be able to go from World to one of our defined geographical
regions (eg Oceania or Europe) and from there down to a country level (eg
UK).

Part of doing this would be altering the maps in some way to roughly mark
out the areas that can be drilled to. Take a look at the BBC news page's
regional map for how they've done this. At regional level you'd want maps
with country outlines, hover text would then be good to see where the final
drill-down would go.

Is this do-able? Are these sources as free as we need? Is there scope for
cross-project collaboration? For the latter, it'd seem reasonable that
Wikipedia have the ability to look up temperature history and say which day
in a year was the hottest/coldest. For Wikiversity the data is a historical
record for any research purpose they can come up with, and we have a need
for it as news - if we do build a long-term record then there's our ability
to analyse it for trends and such. Wikipedia with weather data is one
feature of Wolfram Alpha knocked off. Instead of fancy algorithms that
aren't very good at parsing English queries you'd have lots of curious geeks
writing programs to query the data.

There's quite a few potential uses for Wikinews having this data available.
If you have an earthquake or tsunami then the weather conditions are going
to influence relief efforts. I'm sure people could come up with other
examples.

This sort of begs the question, where should the data be held? We're going
to want it cross-wikinews - do we need weather.wikinews.org? (Or even
weather.wikimedia.org) If so, and we have a good bot for it, could a WMF
server have the spare capacity to run the bot?

Lastly, one of the things I always find useful in a weather map is isobars
with front markings. Rarely seen on TV now, you can quickly tell what
weather is going where and do your own half-day to day forecast. Do we have
enough data to produce these at any particular level of detail?

Brian.

-----Original Message-----
From: wikinews-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikinews-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Paul Williams
Sent: 18 June 2009 15:36
To: Wikinews mailing list
Subject: Re: [Wikinews-l] Weather bot

Hi Milos,

I have a toolserver account I am willing to run the bot on for the English
Wikinews. We shall have a chat at some point over the weekend - can I try
and catch you on IRC?

Regards,

Paul W

User:Skenmy

2009/6/18 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>

I finally made a weather bot according to my wishes. Its characteristics
are:

* It gathers information from wund.com <http://wund.com/> , but it is
possible to make
plugins for other sites and protocols.
* It may gather data from all over the world.
* It may be localized in any language.

The only problem is that one iteration takes at least 5-7 minutes just
for weather in Serbia and just for Wikinews in Serbian. Probably, I
would be able to run enough of instances for covering weather in
Serbia for all Wikinews editions (or, questionable, to run enough of
instances to cover the whole world for sr.wn). That means that I'll
need your help (people who are able to run bots as cron jobs), so we
may cover the whole world for all Wikinews editions.

My other ask is related to programming the bot. I prefer to make the
bot as a collaborative work because it is not reasonable to expect
maintenance of one relatively huge project by just one person. I may
make subversion repository at SourceForge (or at one of the servers in
the company where I am working). If anyone of you are willing to join
me, let me know that. Also, all other ideas are welcome.

You may see its output here [1] (in Serbian).

[1] -
http://sr.wikinews.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82
%D0%B8:%D0%92%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BC%D0%B5/%D0%95%D0%B2%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BF%D0%B0/%
D0%A1%D1%80%D0%B1%D0%B8%D1%98%D0%B0

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