NOAA gives you a text file. When to pull new data? What are the exact parsing rules? Are there exceptions when the format could slightly change? How to convert the values into a nice 1-5 scale? Those are the things you have to spend a day painstakingly searching and reading obscure documents...

That. First, you have to create a known data set from the data, then you have to do a whole bunch of very complex math to normalize all the data that's way above my head (super thanks goes out to no_slogan who did all of the math for me in this thread).

After that, you do have to remember to update the data (typically every five years, but there are known to be incremental changes as well. If the format changes at all, you have to rewrite your parser code that translates it to a format the code understands.

An API would be much more helpful :)

In reply to Re^3: perl hooks for AI by stevieb
in thread perl hooks for AI by Aldebaran

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