Double Diamond! Met Office join Ordnance Survey as FOSS4G Diamond Sponsors
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 (http://2013.foss4g.org/additional-options/) as well as showcasing their open source SciTools (http://scitools.org.uk/) as well as Met Office Data Point (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/datapoint) – 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 (http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/products/os-opendata.html) will be demonstrating their new cartographic offerings within QGIS and the OpenSpace API (http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/web-services/os-openspace/api/index.html).
Notes to the Editor:
About the Met Office: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us
About Ordnance Survey: http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/about-us/our-history/index.html
About FOSS4G (2013.foss4g.org): FOSS4G is the global conference for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial, hosted by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and organised by a Local Organising Committee. FOSS4G will be held in the United Kingdom for the first time in 2013, at the East Midlands Conference Centre (http://www.nottinghamconferences.co.uk/emcc/) in Nottingham, from 17th to 21st September. FOSS4G 2013 will follow on from the Association for Geospatial Information (www.agi.org.uk) annual GeoCommunity event held in the same venue. These two conferences form a part of the geospatial focused events happening across the UK in September (www.maptember.org).
About OSGeo (www.osgeo.org): The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, or OSGeo, is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support the collaborative development of open source geospatial software, and promote its widespread use. The foundation provides financial, organizational and legal support to the broader open source geospatial community. It also serves as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources, secure in the knowledge that their contributions will be maintained for public benefit. OSGeo also serves as an outreach and advocacy organization for the open source geospatial community, and provides a common forum and shared infrastructure for improving cross-project collaboration. The foundation’s projects are all freely available and useable under an OSI-certified open source license http://www.opensource.org/licenses/.
Media Sponsorship: FOSS4G would welcome the support and encouragement of media sponsors. Full details are available at http://2013.foss4g.org/media-sponsorship-package/.
Logo: The FOSS4G logo can be downloaded from: http://2013.foss4g.org/Style/.
