Open Source Tools To Be Created for Seismic Risk Assessment, in support of earthquake risk mitigation
New York, NY September 30, 2010 – OpenGeo today announced that the Global Earthquake Model Foundation (GEM) has selected OpenGeo to support its development of open source earthquake modeling tools. OpenGeo will be developing enhancements for GeoServer and GeoTools to expand the capabilities for collaboration on hazard, risk and socio-economic impact models within the global earthquake risk assessment community. OpenGeo will provide unlimited support and bug fixes for GeoServer to help GEM operate this platform at a global scale and improve the ease of use for its global audience.
Dr. Rui Pinho, Secretary General of GEM, said, "We are excited about this collaboration. We realized that we needed an innovative partner to support us with expanding the capacity of the engine and we had limited developer time to address the situation. We were also looking for a partner with a strong track record in open-source geospatial development. OpenGeo will be able to show us how to extract intelligent summaries from our data and share it in useful ways with our global constituents."
Created as a true community effort, the GEM initiative will produce a state-of-the-art, dynamic and open source model for the assessment of seismic risk worldwide; a model that is based on the probabilistic assessment of earthquake occurrence, the resulting ground motions, and the impact these have on structures and populations in terms of damage, social and economic loss. GEM software and tools will allow for hazard and risk assessment, will include tools for analysis of socio-economic impact and will be available through an open web-based community platform.
Chris Holmes, President of OpenGeo, expressed the importance of the deal by stating, "GEM offers the global risk assessment community a great step forward in understanding and mitigating earthquake risks, and we are very enthusiastic about working with them. We have been consistently impressed with the organization’s work and by their vision for distributing their models, and we are eager to help them develop their ideas. Leveraging OpenGeo’s support of GeoServer and GeoTools will allow GEM to develop a complex suite of risk analysis applications on a robust platform."
About OpenGeo
OpenGeo is a social enterprise working to build the best web-based geospatial technology. The company brings the best practices of open source software to geospatial organizations around the world by providing enterprises with supported, tested, and integrated open source solutions to build the Geospatial Web. OpenGeo also supports open source communities by employing key developers for PostGIS, GeoServer, GeoWebCache, GeoExt, and OpenLayers. The company has an eight-year history of providing successful consulting services and products to clients like Google, Portland Tri-Met, The World Bank and MassGIS/State of Massachusetts. OpenGeo is the geospatial division of OpenPlans, a New York-based 501(c)(3) non-profit which informs and engages communities through journalism and open source software.
