Description WXXM, the Weather Data Model, is a UML-based structural definition for the exchange of information by users of and contributors to the 4-D Wx Data Cube. It was designed by Eurocontrol, in partnership with NNEW. WXXM is not a piece of software, nor does it have any function on its own. It defines a common vocabulary for exchanging weather information between organizations, but it does not inherently provide any sort of functionality to facilitate that exchange. It is, fundamentally, a set of guidelines for how to think about weather data. Overview Despite being referred to as WXXM, the Weather Data Model is in fact a set of three tiered data models, only one part of which is actually called WXXM: the Weather Exchange Model. Together, the three models provide conceptual, structural, and physical representations of weather data. 1. The aptly-named Weather Conceptual Model (WXCM) provides a high-level, implementation-independent look at how weather data concepts are connected. 2. The Weather Exchange Model (WXXM) provides a more logical and structural (if still implementation-independent) perspective of the same data, in more complete detail — the interrelationships of every weather data concept are spelled out. 3. Finally, the Weather Exchange Schema (WXXS) is a machine-generated, XML-formatted implementation of the Exchange Model — a "physical" code version of it. Each of the Weather Data Model's tiers can be thought of as implementations of the previous tier. The high-level base that WXCM provides is detailed in WXXM's breakdown of individual component relationships, which are in turn "made flesh" in WXXS's XML. Because WXCM is fairly abstract, and WXXS is only a single implementation of WXXM, WXXM can be considered the core of the wider, multi-tiered Weather Data Model, and is often used to refer to all three tiers.
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Supra-national authority