THE ENVIRONMENTAL DATA EXCHANGE

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1 THE ENVIRONMENTAL DATA EXCHANGE

2 The Environmental Data Exchange - a discovery platform built by the Digital Catapult in partnership with AMEE to help the discovery, sharing and use of environmental data The platform unlocks the innovation opportunities needed to tackle environmental challenges and opportunities faced by governments, organisations and SMEs alike. As a core challenge area of the Digital Catapult, the opportunity for driving economic growth and accelerating commercial ventures is central to the project. Rather than simply collecting datasets, the platform provides signposts to data sources and datasets, opening up environmental data and making information more accessible and discoverable to everyone. Launched in March 2015, the Environmental Data Exchange acts as a portal from where all interested parties can pull data such as flood risk information, climate models and air quality from multiple sources including the World Bank, DEFRA and DECC. Additionally, by registering with the Environmental Data Exchange, members will be able to discover, download and use the data from the various sources to drive innovations and value within the UK. The platform also puts community and collaboration at its heart allowing members to upload data sources and their metadata, rate the datasets and comment on them DATASETS USED HACKATHON ATTENDEES USE CASES PRESENTED AND DEVELOPED

3 The need With the UK battling to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050, companies, governments and consumers increasingly need to understand at macro and micro-levels the risks, impact, and opportunities for their organisations in relation to environmental resources. At the same time the growth of big data and associated technologies are lowering the barriers to making such data easily accessible and useful. This has made environmental data a critical resource and the demand for such data has created a rush to collect and store thousands of datasets across the globe. However, in order to make sense of these datasets and to make them usable and useful, they needed to be brought together in a way, which enables innovators to unlock the potential of the data and open up commercial opportunities. To address this, the Digital Catapult first ran a scoping project into the need for an environmental data platform. The scoping project gave the Digital Catpault one clear signal the need for a platform which signposts the data sources and datasets rather than collect all datasets in one place. Once this had been established the idea was developed further and AMEE were selected as partners to build the platform alongside the Digital Catapult. A further co-creation scoping workshop was held with a number of relevant SMEs who would be using the platform to flesh out finer details before we then progressed to the build stage with AMEE.

4 The hack weekend Following the platform s launch in March 2015, a hackathon was held at the Digital Catapult Centre and was attended by over 50 people from a range of backgrounds, business sectors and with a variety of skillsets. The hackathon aimed to deliver innovations that will make a difference via the use and analysis of the 500+ datasets available from the Environmental Data Exchange, whilst building a vibrant community for those with an interest and investment in this key data resource. Over the weekend, seven teams presented their ideas some of which are now being progressed and developed further and may be released commercially in the near future. Ideas presented included Smog Dodgers, an app to measure personal exposure to air pollution, and Insight DX, an API focused on making it easier to find and use relevant environmental data on a daily basis. Outcome and conclusions As the platform is focused on building a community and solving problems amongst groups of individuals who share the common goal of driving commercial value from shared data, the hackathon was a great insight into how the project may advance.

5 THE ENVIRONMENTAL DATA EXCHANGE Tyler Christie Speaking of the platform s success to date, Tyler Christie, CEO at AMEE said There is a lot of pressure on the Government, business community and the public, to reduce the UK s environmental impact. Technology can make a huge difference whether that is smart technology to reduce energy consumption or electric charging points to reduce our vehicle emissions. But if such innovations are really going to make an impact, the people and businesses developing them need to be able to access, analyse and draw from all environmental data. Understanding the challenge we are facing is absolutely fundamental to driving innovation and we are proud to be working with the Digital Catapult to help address this. Chirdeep Chhabra, Senior Partnerships Manager at the Digital Catapult said: This platform will enable users to easily access, assess and utilise environmental data while collaborating with others. This could be an absolutely pivotal moment in the UK s drive to reduce its environmental impact. When we formed the Digital Catapult we made a public promise to help foster collaboration between all data stakeholders across all industries in order to unlock data challenges and accelerate great ideas to market. We believe the Environmental Data Exchange will do exactly this. Digital Catapult 2015 Region: England Challenge area: Closed Organisational Data Partners: AMEE Project website: