Meteo Browser South Tyrol

Promoting open data framework with a comprehensive data infrastructure increases publicly available knowledge and provides new unexplored benefits.
The Open Data catalogue of South Tyrol (http://daten.buergernetz.bz.it/) is a bilingual (Italian and German) publicdatabase with a large variety of local data and aims to facilitate data search and data re-usability. The Meteo section of the Open Data catalogue contains several meteorologicaland hydrological variables coming from 120 real-time monitoring stations. Precisely,measurements of air temperature, air humidity, precipitation, wind speed, wind direction,solar radiation, hours of sunlight, river discharge, water level, and ground water level. The dataset available refers to the last three years.
Meteo Browser South Tyrol (http://meteobrowser.eurac.edu/) is a user-friendly web-based application that helps users to filter and download the hydro-meteorological time series freely available in South Tyrol. It is designed for a wide range of users, from common citizens to students as well as researchers, private companies and the public administration.
Meteo Browser South Tyrol is a web application based on the statistical programming language R and the package Shiny and can be used on a local machine or accessed on-line. Its purpose is to access and retrievemeteorological and hydrological time series from the South Tyrolean Meteo Open Data API in an easy and comprehensive way. Drop down menus allow the user to select hydro-meteorological station andmeasurements. A simple map shows where the monitoring stations are, the latest measurements available, and lets the user subset the selected stations geographically by drawing a polygon.
The Meteo Browser South Tyrol can promote data dissemination and being an open source software can foster the development of services in several fields such as higher education, hydrology and agriculture.
Finally, the developed web application provides a fast and comprehensible solution to access, visualize and download openly available databases exposed to a JSON-based API. This can be further developed and possibly expanded to other networks based onsimilar APIs and Open Data standardization.