Entry for Weather Forecast / Australia

Open Data Index Global Open Data Index 2016
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This is a discussion about the submission for Weather Forecast / Australia.

Dear all,

I’m reviewing weather forecast submissions. I had some questions for the Australian one.

@the initial submitter: what are the datasets you are referring your assessment to?

The website you are linking to provides many different data. But only these two pages for example refer to donwloadable data, see here for paid data access, and here and here for a public FTP site.

Wind speed and direction are not contained in this data, which makes me want to change some of the initial answers to “No”, such as downloadable at once, as well as data formats.

Also you found data in a .txt file. Can you specify where you found it?

Thanks in advance

All the best
Danny

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Hi @dannylammerhirt - I think it’s referring to the 7-day forecast for towns/cities available from Weather Data Services which contains wind speed and direction in the forecast line

Data is available in bulk for Districts (Broad Areas), Cities (Major/Main), and Towns (Rural/Regional) by State.

eg: local district forecasts at ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/gen/fwo/IDN11051.xml

1512×140 20.1 KB

And Precis information for the whole state at ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/gen/fwo/IDN11060.xml
1542×155 32.3 KB

combine to make a corresponding text file at ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/gen/fwo/IDN11051.txt

Which matches the online version at Newcastle Forecast

The Coding on the FTP site ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/gen/fwo takes a bit to understand, but has constant identifiers to enable bulk download.- there is more detail at http://reg.bom.gov.au/catalogue/textforecasts.pdf

I didn’t write the initial submission, but have looked through it in the past. Happy to help more if needed?

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Hi @tobybellwood,

thanks so much for clarification. This is very helpful. One outstanding question is whether data is openly licensed. I found terms of use, however it is not clear whether they are compliant with the Open Definition. They state that data must carry an open license (indicated by a logo). This is missing on the FTP page.

If this logo is absent, the data can be used for private use, but must not be redistributed to others. Is that correct? See here

Many thanks
Danny

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I agree @dannylammerhirt - the specific wording at FTP Public products states

Copyright
All products available via the anonymous FTP service are subject to the default terms of the Bureau’s copyright notice: you may download, use and copy that material for personal use, or use within your organisation but you may not supply that material to any other person or use it for any commercial purpose. Users intending to publish Bureau data should do so as Registered Users.

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Excellent! Thank you so much @tobybellwood. I’ll answer the survey accordingly.

All the best
Danny

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one for us to work on for next year!!

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