OSGeo are delighted to be able to announce a second Diamond sponsor for FOSS4G to accompany Ordnance Survey: The Met Office.
The Met Office, like Ordnance Survey is a familiar name to many (and is in fact ranked in the top ten of 2012’s Social Brands 100), but perhaps, like Ordnance Survey, few realise the full range of services that it provides.
As the UK’s National Weather Service, the Met Office is the global leader in providing weather and climate services, employing more than 1,800 people at 60 locations throughout the world. It provides key services such as public forecasts and warnings as well as services to defence, aviation, transport, energy and renewables both in the UK and internationally.
Similarly to Ordnance Survey, it is a Trading Fund within the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, and operates on a commercial basis.
Both the Met Office and Ordnance Survey have made significant commitments in promoting the use of their OpenData, providing resources to facilitating the uptake of the open data.
Ian Edwards, Senior Software Engineer at the Met Office and Chair to the UK Chapter OSGeo commented “The Met Office is very excited about supporting such an important Open Source event as FOSS4G; as an organisation the Met Office is hugely committed to providing data, software and resources at the disposal of the developer community”.
The Met Office will be hosting a developer hackathon during FOSS4G as well as showcasing their open source SciTools as well as Met Office Data Point, a way of accessing freely available Met Office data feeds in a format that is suitable for application developers.
Ordnance Survey, long term proponents of open data will be demonstrating their new cartographic offerings within QGIS and the OpenSpace API.
