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I've got a temperature and humidity sensor that captures the data outside the house and whose data I collect every 5 minutes.

Is there a standard protocol/format that I can use to publish those data on the web, preferably on my homepage? Maybe even a software that does this automatically?

I found the following online services that one can send data to:

They have only submission protocols, but no standard way to publish the data (make them available to others).

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  • Possibly this could be reworded into a request to recommend software that publishes such data in a standard format! – Steve Barnes Aug 31 '15 at 12:47
  • Are you in the US? – philshem♦ Sep 1 '15 at 6:03
  • No, but that should not make any difference. – cweiske Sep 1 '15 at 14:46
  • I'm missing something. If you publish data to wunderground.com, other people can view it without registration: wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/… – Barry Carter Sep 1 '15 at 20:19
  • But i'd also like to publish it on my website, and I need a protocol/format for that so others can use the data. Extracting the data from wunderground's html pages is not easy. – cweiske Sep 1 '15 at 20:22
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Much of this is answered in a previous question.

You, however, want to self-publish the data. The problem is that there's no finding system for self-published data, therefore, it's pretty useless. If I'm looking for fine-grained weather information in your area, how am I supposed to know that you've published it?

For data like this, for it to be useful to others, you need to contribute it to these aggregating networks. I would hope that they'd also look for abnormalities from sensor stations, so that they can report which data sources might be suspect (eg, this one's always reading 10° higher than neighboring stations).

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  • Publishing is step 1. Finding/Aggregating the data of multiple stations is step 2. I can't do step 2 without 1. – cweiske Sep 3 '15 at 14:05
  • @cweiske : no, it's not. Because if you don't know what the network is that you're going to be joining, you have no idea what their standards & requirements are. An individual sensor station is functionally useless for science, as you have no idea what the data quality is. Unless you're taking the 'vanity press' equivalent of serving data, you need to figure out what sensor networks you can join, and then that will dictate what you need to do with your data. For this type of data 'release it and people will use it' just doesn't hold true. – Joe Sep 3 '15 at 14:15
  • "what their standards are" - and that's what I'm looking for, a standard. But all those networks have are their own formats, not standards. If it was a standard, then multiple networks would use it, and publishing it on my homepage would make sense. – cweiske Sep 4 '15 at 5:13
  • @cweiske : there's little semantic difference between a format and a standard in this case. There are likely reasons that they haven't coalesced to just one. Good, useful data is more than just a bunch of numbers that someone can parse -- you need all of the contextual information, too. Even something like METAR is just not a bunch of temperatures (and/or humidity) in isolation. – Joe Sep 4 '15 at 11:49

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