The public/private group responsible for developing a Global Earthquake Model (GEM) has launched an online survey that it hopes will help set the parameters for the open source project.
The survey was launched on October 1st and is set for completion between February and March of Next year, says Rui Pinho, secretary general of the GEM Foundation and an assistant professor of structural design at the University of Pavia in Italy.
Responding to email questions, Pinho says that the goal of the survey is to determine the needs of “stakeholders and end-users” of the GEM around global hazard and risk assessment.
“This effectively means that the survey addresses not only the products that the community would like to see made available at the end of GEM’s first five years of activities, but also the way in which these are developed and disseminated,” Pinho says.
Although some of the survey questions are general in nature, Pinho explains that the current survey is the first in a series that will be issued by the GEM as it determines specific criteria.
“The biggest challenge in developing a global seismic risk model is exactly that: making sure that the global community is indeed engaged in such development so that the end result will be universally accepted and representative,” Pinho says.
GEM was created in 2008 as an open-source alternative for quantifying earthquake risks across the globe. The project is sponsored by a number of private reinsurance and catastrophe modeling firms, including Munich Re, AIR and Willis.
