Collaborative Development of GEM

We believe that a global model can only be built in full cooperation with the community, and in this way become authoritative because it is trusted. Stakeholders worldwide hence drive the development of the Global Earthquake Model, with at the core experts in the fields of hazard and risk assessment.

This modus-operandi allows hundreds of individuals and organisations to be involved in development and deployment of (open) standards and databases that can continuously capture the best understanding of earthquake risk anywhere in the world, and of tools that we can use to analyse and deal with that risk.

Building on the results of the GEM1-pilot project, current development of the global earthquake risk model can be depicted as follows:

GEM’s Executive Committee brings the activities of the three core elements Global Components, Regional Programmes and Model Facility together; a process which is monitored by GEM’s Scientific Board. Often, dedicated groups of leading international experts from GEM’s Technical Advisory Pool are formed to further support the process.

  • Global Component projects are carried out by international consortia who are selected after a thorough process of expert elicitation, community feedback, and peer review. Experts and stakeholders working in GEM-related fields can provide feedback on the work carried out, through GEM Nexus, GEM's collaboration platform.
  • Regional Programmes provide feedback on development of the Global Components and work on data collection and regional input models for GEM.
  • The Model Facility oversees development of the OpenGEM risk assessment platform and the OpenQuake software that powers hazard and risk calculations at any scale. OpenQuake is developed in the open, allowing a wider community of developers and expert-users to jointly enhance the software.
  • The GEM Model and OpenQuake software will be the main ingredients of OpenGEM. A dedicated facility will test the platform extensively before it is released to the public at the end of 2013.


Continuous development together with the wider community
The model aims to cover the entire globe as uniformly as possible, and to incorporate the latest scientific approaches, so that seismic hazard and risk can be explored under different assumptions. For keeping the model up-to-date and incorporating ever-more data, especially on a local scale, we however rely on our stakeholders.

The tools and standardized methods for obtaining and analyzing data that are currently being developed, such as global building inventories and strategies for assessing the vulnerability of buildings are being used by GEM collaborators worldwide to begin the process of assembling the needed datasets, which will then find their way into v1 of the OpenGEM risk assessment platform.

From 2014 onwards, researchers, agencies, and institutions can adopt and enhance these tools, can provide comments and can populate the datasets, as to contiuously update and improve the model. Such process of 'crowdsourcing' is obviously closely monitored and data quality-controlled to always ensure highest quality of data and compatibility.

We hope and envisage scientists, practitioners, IT-experts and others to actually use the critical gaps in the model that we highlight, to collaborate with us and collectively work on making the model and its IT-infrastructure of better use for all stakeholders worldwide. Now and in the future.