They say when it rains, it pours, and in the world of big data it feels like monsoon season as more and more governments are moving their vast repositories of data into the cloud and opening them up to the public.
Recently, the City of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada announced the launch of its Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) DataLab project. Also, the City of Bremen in Germany took its Open Data project mobile. Created by a local student, the Open Bremen smartphone application provides citizens with quick access to local data and information, such as addresses and directions to city attractions.
Now, it looks like the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office (Met Office) is jumping into the game, according to a post today on the Openness @ Microsoft Blog.
“The Met is using the Windows Azure Marketplace to host their weather data archives and make the data broadly available. The release of the weather information to the public was a key component of the government’s plan, announced in the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s 2011 Autumn statement, to encourage new market opportunities and improve standards and transparency in public services,” writes Mark Gayler of Microsoft Open Technologies.
And we’re talking A LOT of weather data here. According to Gayler’s post, “Raw observation weather data from the Met Office’s 150 weather stations and 5,000 forecast sites around the country is now available for the public to download, interpret, and create their own forecasts.”
The weather data is available on both the U.K. government’s open government site and Microsoft’s Windows Azure Marketplace, which makes the data available for free as a query dataset easily accessible with Excel PowerPivot.
Head on over to the Openness @ Microsoft Blog for more detail.
Jeff Meisner
Microsoft News Center Staff