Digital Weather Markup Language

NOAA has created XML-feeds of their weather forecasts so that they can easily be integrated in websites or other applications. Although private weather companies are urging NOAA to stop providing these feeds, I believe marine software companies should take advantage of this development by integrating weather forecasts in applications like chartplotters. Since NOAA uses web service standards this should be relatively easy and we can expect to see some innovative uses. With more and more boats being permanently connected to the internet, it could prove to be a very valuable feature.
“In addition to the SOAP technology, this service exploits XML to enhance the ease with which NWS customers and partners can integrate NDFD (National Digital Forecast Database) data into their computer applications. XML is a W3C standard that allows its users to create languages with HTML-like tags and attributes. The NDFD XML language is called Digital Weather Markup Language (DWML) and its schema can be found at the following link.”