Hi, I was wondering if there would be interest in numerical models of
physical constants. For instance, saturation pressure of water vapor in
air at a particular temperature. It would also be appropriate to
provide a method to get relative humidity from wet and dry bulb
temperatures since it directly relates to this saturation pressure. All
of the models should be time-invariant, e.g., no historical weather
observations.
A simple unexplained model isn't very useful so there would be multiple
elements:
1) a significant and attributed dataset. You don't want three numbers
somebody found in the back of some book, you want something like 1% of
the values in the 74th edition of the CRC handbook of bobcats and
weasels. This would be provided as a XML document, and there would be a
mechanism to support both multivariant data and sets of related values.
I don't know how copyright plays into this since it's redistributing
data. I know that, in the past, it would have been okay in the US at
least. There are famous cases involving phone books,
compilers/assemblers, etc., that established that you can copyright the
presentation but not facts. But I know publishers were trying to change
that, and I'm not familiar with copyright law in other countries.
(It would also be nice to have tools to help people see if they screwed
up the data when entering it.)
2) one or more numeric models, plus methods to calculate the appropriate
coefficients from the data. You could have multiple models because of
different needs. E.g., one person requires a highly accurate model, but
for somebody else the best fit could be something 'quick and dirty'
since they're computing millions of values but don't need high accuracy.
3) analysis tools, to determine how accurate the model is.
4) (maybe) tools to create standard charts and graphs. E.g., in
meteorology there is a standard chart used with weather balloons because
it makes it easy to determine if the atmosphere is unstable. Having the
ability to produce this chart + overlaid data would be very useful, but
what format? With what tools? E.g., do you produce embedded postscript
(for print media)? An image? A SVG?
The second and third items could probably pull a lot from [math], or
even reside in that project, with just the actual models and the
underlying data in this project. Obviously people should be able to
download just the model. On the other hand some people might want to
write their own models and having the tools and data in place would be a
godsend.
About myself: I have undergraduate degrees in both math and physics,
most of an advanced degree in computer science, and have been working as
a professional software developer for 25 years. The motivation for this
proposal is working at NOAA a decade ago - I worked with scientists who
knew the science but didn't know they didn't know enough to write
well-engineered numerical models. The 'three unattributed data points'
isn't a joke. I've been planning to make this proposal for years, I've
just never gotten around to it.
Bear
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