OpenModel Project
The world’s population is facing many daunting challenges including affordable access to modern energy, climate change, environmental degradation, dwindling water resources, loss of biodiversity, pandemics, failing public health, terrorist networks, proliferation of nuclear materials, etc. These challenges are often multi-national, if not global in scope. At the same time people, both as individuals and through organizations, are gaining a larger voice in their own destiny and having a global impact. A third phenomenon, the growth in Internet tools and faster /lower cost hardware, has led to an exponential increase in access to information and is connecting an increasing number of people.
Rajan Gupta and Hans Ziock
The OpenModel project harnesses the growing capabilities of the internet to to address these global challenges. Specifically, how can people collaborate globally to extract knowledge efficiently from large heterogeneous bodies of information and present it in a simple and transparent format? Such an effort would engage the international public, create virtual organizations to reach consensus across boundaries, and motivate collective bottom-up solutions to the many daunting challenges.
We investigate these questions by focusing on a critically important issue facing mankind, namely the growing energy-environment-climate challenge. Our approach is to establish an open platform for geographical and temporally referenced information on, and analysis of, global energy systems, and the energy end-use and associated environmental impacts of individuals. Furthermore, are developing an automated system for gathering, validating and managing heterogeneous data (volunteered and captured from open sources) and integrating it with analysis and modeling tools. In addition to informing the public about ongoing change in energy systems and how individuals can reduce their environmental footprint, we engage both experts and the public through a common and transparent data and analysis management system to organically grow the proposed knowledge base. Achieving this engagement allows the investigation of the process of making decisions where the decision makers and those impacted have access to similar data, analysis, and deductive tools.
Our goal is to combine world leading computational science, information management systems, systems analysis and modeling expertise with global public participation in order to understand emergent behavior in energy systems, public perceptions and opinions. This understanding can then be applied to facilitate the transition to environmentally sustainable, economically viable carbon-neutral solutions to the energy challenge.
How to Engage
- Explore, contribute, comment on the OpenModel website
- Participate in the LANL Global Energy Summer School. We are actively recruiting mentors Check the summerschool website in the next month for opportunities for students.
- Contact Rajan Gupta (rajan@lanl.gov) or Hans Ziock (ziock@lanl.gov)
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