WeatherScope - Locally-Hosted Data

[Mike Hardiman]

So, I've been messing around with OCS's WeatherScope software lately, and have found that it holds promise. However, I'm having some trouble trying to customize data sources.

Does anyone know if it is possible to read in configuration files (such as siteinfo.xml files, which contain station tables), or for that matter, even shapefiles, from the local hard disk?

The "Help" files seem to indicate that everything needs to be on the web.

For example, when explaining how to load a custom shapefile, the help files mention the following with respect to setting up the config.xml file:

• baseURL is the base URL where the data set is located (e.g., http://sdg.ocs.ou.edu/weathersoft/datasets/edu.ou.ocs.usshapes);

It would seem that having to upload a bloated shapefile to the internet would be an unnecessary requirement.

Another example... (admittedly, this may be hard to follow): I've found that there is International surface ob data available in MDF format (e.g., http://www.mesonet.org/data/public/noaa/metar/mdf/Canada/), but there are no online *.xml files to define the data (as there is for US-based surface data at http://sdg.mesonet.org/weathersoft/datasets/edu.ou.ocs.asos/info/)

So I set up my own local folder in the proper directory, just called it 'edu.ou.ocs.asoscan' ... and copied over the various xml files. I added station info for one Canadian site (CYUL) to my local version of siteinfo.xml, and changed the 'dataUrlFormat' string in config.xml to point to the directory with the Canadian surface data.

This seemed successful at first -- there was a new source in the menus, but when selected...no plot appeared, not even when zoomed into where CYUL should be. The log files indicated that the Canadian mdf file was imported properly. My guess is that my local "siteinfo.xml" file was being ignored, in favor of the siteinfo.xml file located on the web at http://sdg.mesonet.org/weathersoft/datasets/edu.ou.ocs.asos/info/ -- which obviously only included US stations. But, when I changed my local config.xml so that "siteinfoUrl" pointed to my locally-modified version of siteinfo.xml... replacing "http://blahblah..." with "C:\Path\siteinfo.xml" (and subsequently tried "file:///C:\Path...") the new dataset didn't even show up in the menus any more.

Surely there must be a way to read in shapefiles and config files from the local disk, and not just a web URL???

-Mike

 

[Lou Ruh]

I am not familiar with the program and have not reviewed and documentation for it. My initial reaction was to try file:/// , but, since you've already tried that, it sounds like the program is expecting certain things in the "service" portion of the URL and only supports the protocols defined by those services. I would hope it would support at least http and ftp (and, it would be good to support the ssl version of those too, https and ftps). Since it is clear that http is supported, you can install a very lightweight http server on your local machine and then access the file(s) via http://localhost/<file> . At least, that's what I would try next.