History and credits

The ITIA research team of the National Technical University of Athens, lead by professor Demetris Koutsoyiannis, has been developing databases for hydrological time series since 1990. Over the years we have experimented and worked with ever changing technologies. We have used various RDBMS's (INGRES, Oracle, MS Access, InterBase, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite) and several programming languages (C, VB, Object Pascal, Perl, Python). As we have developed large and small databases and processing software, our data storing techniques have matured, and are still evolving.

The concept of openmeteo.org, that is, a publicly accessibly database of free data, offered together with free software, was an idea with which we have been experimenting since the early 2000's. An early version was developed in 2003 and failed.

In 2009, we were assigned the improvement of the National Databank of Hydrological and Meteorological Information, a project with which we had also been involved in the past. The time was now ripe to put emphasis on free software. We used the funding not only on technical improvements, but also on the effort required to make the software free. Hydrognomon, our flagship product, is now free software. Enhydris was developed from scratch, and of course it is free software. The development of Enhydris proceeded not strictly within the pressing needs of the National Databank, but also with openmeteo.org in mind. In 2011, openmeteo.org was ready for use by the public.

This is the list of people, organizations and companies who made openmeteo.org possible:

Antonis Christofides (openmeteo.org founder, system administrator, and initial developer of Hydrognomon and Enhydris)

Stefanos Kozanis (principal maintainer of Hydrognomon, Enhydris, and openmeteo.org)

George Karavokiros (Enhydris developer)

Demetris Koutsoyiannis, Nikos Mamassis (scientific advisors)

Antonis Koukouvinos (GIS consultant)

Katerina Tzouka, Sandra Baki, Yiannis Markonis, Hristos Tyralis, Evangelos Rozos, Panayiotis Dimitriadis, Andreas Efstratiadis (administrative help and quality control)

 

National Technical University of Athens (our institution, which also provides hosting)

Ministry of Public Works and the Hydroscope Systems Consortium (funders)

GEOSET Ltd (Michalis Salachoris and partners; GIS consultants)

Indifex (Dimitris Glezos, Andreas Loupasakis, Seraphim Mellos; subcontractors who developed Enhydris)