"I've seen the future - and it works"

It's not often you see something that has the potential to change the way you work, but that privilege was granted recently when an early proof of concept for the CHARMe system was demonstrated over the web. The CHARMe project is developing an online system for collecting and sharing user experiences and feedback on climate datasets. This is to help users judge how suitable such climate data are for an intended application. The user feedback could be comments about assessments, citations, or provenance of the dataset, or other information such as descriptions of uncertainty or data quality. The key point is that this supporting information becomes accessible alongside the data.


The CHARMe system is under development and a beta version should be available in mid-2014 with early testing soon after by selected users. The aim is for the system to go live in late 2014, ready to capture and then share the expertise of climate and Earth observation data users around the world.