The following guest post is by Roberta Borgognoni and Ben Wyss, from the GEM Foundation. They will be joining us at OKCon 2011.
We are involved in the global collaborative effort GEM. GEM is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to engage a global community in the design, development and deployment of state-of-the-art models and tools for earthquake risk assessment worldwide.
We believe that risk information must be made broadly available in order to be adopted for risk-mitigation. This is why GEM is producing open-source software, transparent tools and global datasets that are openly accessible to different users around the world.
GEM is currently developing OpenQuake, which is an open source software application that allows users to compute seismic hazard and risk on any scale. We’re aiming to serve a full spectrum of users by 2013 in assessing and modeling earthquake risk, and in communicating it through maps and other types of output, so that it can be shared. We have a large and vibrant community, made up of developers (and future users) from around the globe – but we’d love to meet more people interested in contributing!
There’s so much to discuss with the OKF Community, and we’re excited about meeting up with people at OKCon. Some things we’d like to chat about are:
- Meeting with people working on similar projects and facing similar open data challenges;
- Working towards advancements in scientific knowledge through common standards and data validation;
- Issues on data licensing;
- Collaboration with other organisations / sharing and using data from different sources;
- Idea of linking with other perils working together on risk mitigation solutions;
- Making the tools and data that we are producing available for other projects;
- Open source platform (GeoNode) for collaborative data collection and mapping and in the future federating datasets
You can get in touch with us at info [at] openquake [dot] org, or come and speak to us at OKCon!
The OKCon2011 has been so great for us working for the Global Earthquake Model collaborative effort, thank you everyone ever so much! We were really excited to meet so many people working on similar projects and facing similar open data challenges, it was such a unique opportunity to share our experience and chat about future collaborations.
The Open Science Panel session on day I was just the starting point to get introduced to people working on other enlightening projects with whom we will definitely keep in contact for future cooperation and exchange of ideas.
We have become active in the Open Science group to become more in touch with issues relating to open knowledge/open data, we were very keen to learn more about volunteer computing, crowdsourcing platform, data visualization tools, and other up and coming technologies, as well as new and arising data licensing issues.
We are looking forward to possible collaborations with OKF Community and hope to offer in the future presentations of our OpenQuake project!