25 July 2011.

The ITIA research team of the National Technical University of Athens
(NTUA), Greece, is proud to announce the availability of a new
service, http://openmeteo.org/db/. Anyone who maintains one or more
measuring stations can use the service to manage and publish the
collected data.

Until today, individuals or organisations managing meteorological or
hydrological stations needed to either collect the data on their
personal computer or bear the necessary costs for setting up a
server. This now changes with the availability of Enhydris, a free
server software for managing a database of stations and their data,
and the openmeteo.org database, an installation of Enhydris that is
available to the public. Instead of maintaining their own servers,
users and organisations may use the openmeteo.org database to upload
their data, on condition that their data will be available to the
public under a free license (the Open Database License and the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, depending on the type
of data). Each user has write access to his own data, whereas the
public has read access to all the data. "The availability of free
data is of tremendous importance for scientific research," comments
Professor Demetris Koutsoyiannis, NTUA. "This is why we have been
using a lot of data from the United States, because it is free. With
openmeteo.org/db, we hope to encourage Greece and the rest of the
world to follow this practice. We also hope to provide appropriate
tools to people who cannot otherwise afford them, such as amateurs and
small organizations. This can help enlarge the publicly available pool
of data." "As we know from Wikipedia, free information and free
software go hand-in-hand," adds Antonis Christofides, founder of
openmeteo.org. "This is why at openmeteo.org you can get both."

Permanent link to this press release: http://openmeteo.org/new-db-service-announcement/

Contact: Stefanos Kozanis