Community Project

Weather View for Tabulator

Kjetil Kjernsmo

1. Please provide a brief description of your proposed project.

I propose a weather view for Tabulator, but it should be ontology-based.

2. Why did you select this particular project?

Weather services are extremely popular. In fact, people are telling me it is the most popular service on big portals. I just noted one of Norway's largest newspapers has a weather mashup. The text is in Norwegian, but you get the idea, Google Maps + weather data. And I thought that it should be pretty straightforward to do with the maps view in Tabulator. I think that automating mashups, i.e. the thing is that it should be possible to select the icon to display on the map based on the ontology only, is one of the main semweb things we want to showcase. Moreover, meteorologists use a pretty strict vocabulary, and therefore it lends itself well to meaningfull translations and analysis.

3. Why do you think this project will have a wide impact?

Basically, the popularity of weather services can make people look to semweb to do it, if we do it in Tabulator as a demo. Then people may create extensions and widgets that do similar things, which gets the ball rolling.

4. Can your project be easily integrated with other wide-spread systems? If so, which and how?

It is specifically for Tabulator, and an Opera widget may become interesting.

5. Why is it that this project should be done right now, i.e. why should people prioritise this ahead of other projects?

Not among the strongest points, but I think this is the kind of thing that would be easier with RDF than microformats.

6. What can you contribute to the project?

I must admit that I cannot contribute code, but I have many friends within the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, perhaps I could convince them to participate in creating an ontology and provide real-life data.

7. What contribution would you need from others?

The code that would place a custom icon on the map view if it is a subclass of some icon class.

8. What standardisation should the Semantic Web community at large undertake to support the project?

A weather ontology would be nice.

9. How does your project encourage others not currently involved with Semantic Web technologies to get involved (by providing data or make a coding commitment)?

By showcasing that this would work, I think we would demonstrate the strength of Semantic Web.

10. What would be the main benefit of using Semantic Web technologies to achieve the goals of the project, compared to other technologies?

That you don't actually need programmers to achieve the same effect as done on dagbladet.no, is important.

Commitments

If you like this project, please write your name below and indicate what contribution you can make to the project.