A consortium led by the Met Office, and including IBM, Imperial College Business School and Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, has been awarded multi-million pound match funding by the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) to undertake a 15 month programme to prove the concept of Open Platform.

Open Platform seeks to create an online marketplace to exchange knowledge, data and modelling techniques between the government, disaster risk reduction and insurance sectors, the goal being to innovative solutions for managing risk for adapting to environmental change and extremes.

Sam Nixson, project director of the Open Platform consortium, commented: “The Open Platform will initially address the needs of the Aid, Disaster Reduction and Insurance communities, and their requirement to understand past, present and future environmental impacts in their management of risk.”

The Open Platform is a technology enabled business platform, like that of Google, iTunes, Amazon or EBay. The project aims to address the fundamental barriers to effective risk management including:

•Allowing different types of data to be combined, exchanged and modelled with other types of data to understand impact;
•Provision of information about the quality and provenance of data to enable informed decisions to be made.
There will also be tools available on the platform to allow businesses to use the data more effectively including search, algorithms, models and visualisation applications.

Phil Evans, government services director at the Met Office said: “The aim is that Open Platform will provide access to a broad range of data including environmental, social, technical and financial data, enabling standardisation. This means that the data can then be more easily combined, modelled and applied to support the understanding of risks, impacts and interrelationships affecting insurance, societies and governments.”

“Co-operation between infrastructure providers, content producers, users and software developers is vital if we are to extract true economic value from the Internet,” Nick Appleyard, the Technology Strategy Board’s head of digital, said. “Such innovative, collaborative thinking will help to create a world-leading platform for UK business in the future and will allow the UK’s digital economy to grow and thrive.”

Sir Brian Hoskins, director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, added: “This is an exciting new venture in the area of climate science and a great opportunity for encouraging the use of climate data in new and innovative ways. We’re delighted to be involved in it at this early stage of its conception.”

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