1854 The observation as a public instrument

Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy founded the Met Office in 1854. The national weather service that followed rested on a premise this specification inherits: an observation becomes useful to others only when the conditions of its making are known and shared. ^[1]

WMO Global observing as a system

The World Meteorological Organization’s Global Observing System collects weather, climate, water and environmental data from satellites and surface stations, and is now part of WIGOS, the overarching framework for all WMO observing systems. WIS 2.0 carries the exchange of those data onto open standards and Web technologies. The protocol treats these frameworks as the reference for describing stations and publishing their data. ^[2][3][4]

1972 Observation from orbit

Landsat 1 launched on 23 July 1972 and began the longest-running Earth-observation satellite programme; Copernicus is the European Union’s Earth-observation programme. Space and ground observations meet in one product only when their time, geometry and quality are stated; the protocol requires that context on every value. ^[5][6]

Semantics Shared vocabularies for sensing

The OGC SensorThings API offers an open, geospatially enabled way to interconnect sensing devices, data and applications; the W3C Semantic Sensor Network ontology, a Recommendation since 2017, gives observations, sensors and samples a common meaning. The protocol describes instruments in these terms rather than in terms of its own. ^[7][8]

2013–2016 Provenance and reuse

The W3C PROV documents (2013) define an interchange model for provenance; the FAIR Guiding Principles (2016) ask that data be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. The protocol attaches provenance, uncertainty, quality and correction state to every value, so that reuse never strips the conditions of measurement. ^[9][10]

12 of 21

1. Met Office. “Our history.” www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/who-we-are/our-history
2. World Meteorological Organization. “Global Observing System (GOS).” community.wmo.int/en/activity-areas/global-observing-system-gos
3. World Meteorological Organization. “WMO Integrated Global Observing System (WIGOS).” community.wmo.int/en/activity-areas/wigos
4. World Meteorological Organization. “WMO Information System (WIS) and WIS 2.0.” community.wmo.int/en/activity-areas/wis
5. NASA. “Landsat 1.” landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/satellites/landsat-1/
6. European Union. “Copernicus.” www.copernicus.eu/en
7. Open Geospatial Consortium. “OGC SensorThings API.” www.ogc.org/standards/sensorthings/
8. W3C (2017). “Semantic Sensor Network Ontology.” W3C Recommendation, 19 October 2017. www.w3.org/TR/vocab-ssn/
9. W3C (2013). “PROV-Overview: An Overview of the PROV Family of Documents.” W3C Working Group Note, 30 April 2013. www.w3.org/TR/prov-overview/
10. Wilkinson, M. D., et al. (2016). “The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship.” Scientific Data 3, 160018. doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18
11. Bradner, S. (1997). RFC 2119, “Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels.” IETF. www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119
12. Leiba, B. (2017). RFC 8174, “Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words.” IETF. www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8174