Frequently Asked Questions

General Questions

What is “birdhouse”?

Birdhouse is collection of Python packages to make the usage of Web Processing Services (WPS) easy. The available packages are used in the climate science community.

What is “WPS”?

The very short answer

WPS is the acronym for Web Processing Service.

The sligthly longer answer

So, let’s say you have a function (maybe written in Python) which might calculate the “summer days in Finland since 1990”. Then this function has probably input parameters (region, from-date, to-date, NetCDF files, …) and an output (or even more …) which might be just an integer number or a text document or even a nice diagram. Now, you would like to provide this function as a web service, so that other people can call it with just a simple URL like:

http://myhost/wps/identifier=summer_days&region=finland&from=1990

… ok … then you should have a deeper look at this WPS thing.

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