OpenCDMS Opportunities and Benefits

The OpenCDMS project aims to facilitate solutions to a number of problems:

1. Observation time-series data, especially for climate, hydrology and other application areas, is not well-managed in many NMHS, particularly in the developing and least-developed countries. This has several aspects including lack of training and investment in long-term sustainability, introduction of automatic weather stations without a corresponding investment in maintenance and calibration, difficulties in moving from paper-based to electronic archiving systems.
2. Database systems have a limited life, but the observation data and metadata they contain needs to be kept forever.
3. Quality requirements for observation time-series data are increasing, particularly as huge social and funding decisions depend on climate change impacts studies.
4. WMO resolutions govern the availability and use of categories of observation data; future development of these rules is expected, while national rules for data access vary.
5. Tools and techniques need to be peer-reviewed to ensure that they implement appropriate best-practice, and continue to evolve with technology change.

The long-term benefit of the Project is to improve management of time-series observation data as a permanent public-good asset of national governments, for use in an increasing range of applications and services.

Opportunities include an increasing awareness of the value of open-source software, and of the tools available to develop this in a co-operative manner; increased awareness of the need for data rescue (digitising data from paper and obsolete media such as microfiche) and manage these data effectively; funding for implementation of future-proof CDMS.

A potential long-term opportunity would be to integrate the present to historical observation processing of OpenCDMS with the near-real-time observation processing of OpenWIS, by ensuring storage at the point of observation is integrated with the data access required for NWP applications.