Open Geodata | Open Knowledge Foundation Blog

"My home – as you can see – is flooded, for the second time in a month. The mighty Thames is reclaiming its flood-plains, and making humans – especially the UK government’s Environment Agency – look puny and irrelevant. As I wade to and fro, putting sandbags around the doors, carrying valuables upstairs, and adding bricks to the stacks that prop up the heirloom piano, I occasionally check the river level data at the Agency website, and try to estimate how high the water will rise, and when.  There are thousands of river monitoring stations across the UK, recording water levels every few minutes. The Agency publishes the resulting data on its website, in pages like this. For each station it shows a graph of the level over the last 24 hours (actually, the 24 hours up to the last reported data: my local station stopped reporting three days ago, presumably overwhelmed by the water), and has some running text giving the current level in metres above a local datum. There’s a small amount of station metadata, and that’s all. No older data, and no tabular data. I can’t ..."