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Met Office partners with the Open Data Institute

The Met Office is pleased to announce it is joining the Open Data Institute's (ODI) membership programme as a partner. It will join organisations such as Arup, Telefonica, Thomson Reuters and the University of Southampton, all leading the way for best practice for open data usage and delivery in their particular industry or field.

The Met Office already publishes significant amounts of open data via its DataPoint API service, including 5 day forecasts, real time observations and Mountain and National Parks forecasts. As part of the partnership the Met Office will be working with the  ODI to both improve and expand its range of available data.

The Met Office has a responsibility under the Public Records Act to record the history of the UK's weather and has paper records archived that date back to 1854 - the year the Met Office was founded. One of the areas the Met Office will look at as part of it's partnership with the ODI is maximising the benefits of making the data created digitally, available on-line.

Charles Ewen, Chief Information Officer at the Met Office said: "The Met Office takes open data very seriously and we're excited to be working with the ODI to make open data more useful and widely used by existing and potential re-users.

"Data services play an important part in our aim to make weather and climate information as available as possible for UK citizens and our relationship with the ODI will help us do that even more effectively."

Gavin Starks, ODI Chief Executive Officer said: "The Met Office is a world-class British institution actively seeking to innovate in tackling national and global challenges.

"Climate and weather data are a core part of our national information infrastructure, and critical to our future. Opening up more of the Met Office's data, and evolving to sustainable open business models, will provide exemplars of the power of open: helping to address social, economic and environmental impacts for everyone."

 

Channel website: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk

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