GEM is a global collaborative effort that brings together state-of-the-art science, national, regional and international organizations and individuals aimed at the establishment of uniform and open standards for calculating and communicating earthquake risk worldwide. Hundreds of organisations and individual experts and professionals are working on GEM.
By the end of 2013 this collaboration will have led to a first version of a comprehensive global earthquake risk model as an underlying basis for a user-intuitive web-based risk assessment platform OpenGEM. This platform will be accessible to a great variety of users, will be powered by OpenQuake and will include tools that contribute to the mitigation of seismic risk around the world. For more information on GEM, its mission and programme until 2013, please visit www.globalquakemodel.org. You may also download the latest annual report.
GEM IT
Below you find an overview of GEM’s IT infrastructure, providing insight in how various components together make up the structure that is aimed at development of OpenGEM.
IT-infrastructure
OpenQuake is at the core of GEM’s IT infrastructure, together with Open GEM Model. The Open GEM Model is the combination of all methods, databases and standards that are being developed by GEM collaborators on global and regional scales, which contains non-proprietary data. The ‘GEM Model’ is similar, but contains proprietary data which cannot be made public. OpenQuake and both the OpenGEM and GEM Model are connected to the GEM Model Facility. Through its servers and cloud computing, the GEM Model Facility hosts and also supports the data service(s) that GEM will offer the users of the OpenGEM platform, which is the future entry point for calculation and communication of earthquake risk.
OpenQuake is powered by a number of open source software projects, of which OpenSHA-lite and RiskLib are currently the most essential ones. OpenSHA-lite is a ‘light’ version of the comprehensive software for probabilistic seismic hazard assessment OpenSHA and whose code serves as a basis for the hazard component of the OpenQuake engine. RiskLib is a global collaboration project that is aimed at common development of a code ‘library’ for the risk all types of natural hazards, including an API, on which ‘apps’ can be built, such as tools that support risk mitigation/reduction. The World Bank’s GFDRR, OpenGeo, AIFDR and GEM jointly work on RiskLib and its code repository, currently part of the OpenQuake project, will be broken out soon.
Implementation of a standard format for data exchange for natural hazard and risk, is closely related to what is described above. The NRML (Natural hazards’ Risk Markup Language) format has been developed, which is capable of encompassing a wide variety of risk and hazard data formats. More information can be found in the detailed background documentation for OpenQuake.
The data services that are mentioned above are globally accessible read/write collaborations of core data sets that are exposed with a REST API. Some of the core modules of GEM will be available through the services and are currently being developed by GEM’s Model Facility development team, in collaboration with a number of IT partners and the scientists coordinating the modules. Examples are the development of a global exposure database, development of a global portal for active faults, global vulnerability functions and an earthquake consequences database.