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Interview with Joaquin van Peborgh

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Interview with Joaquin van Peborgh
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44
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CC Attribution 3.0 Germany:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Production Year2023
Production PlaceWageningen

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Abstract
Joaquin will showcase the OpenClimate platform, the data schema and data aggregation work done, and our roadmap and opportunities of collaboration for the open source and open data community. Following this presentation, he was asked a few questions by OEMC’s Working Package 8 OpenGeoHub’s communication experts
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
I'm Joaquin Van Porg, Director of Product and Opener Foundation, where we build open source tech for the planets. And I just showcased the Open Climate Network, which is a nested climate accounting platform, right, in which we aggregate different data sources for emissions for countries, regions, cities, and companies, right,
all with a common data schema and a common data platform to explore and see their emission strengths. So basically, we're trying to tackle the problem of data fragmentation and data accessibility for emission tracking for actors at different levels.
So it's really hard to find data for some actors that are not nationals, or sometimes even nationals, but trying to fight for provinces, states, cities, and companies. Finding emissions data is hard, and when you find it, it's also hard to compare because they have different standards, right? So the problem with tagging there is first aggregating all these different publicly available data sources and putting
them onto a same data set that has been harmonizing the different data sets into a common data schema. So they're easy comparable and easy to aggregate, to manipulate, to do analysis on.
We do that by putting it into an open data set with an open API as well, an open source platform where you can also visualize it, right? So depending if you're a researcher or just an analyst, you can download data, manipulate it, or you can also just access it through a simple UI, a simple platform where you can find the data and navigate for all of these different type of factors.
Yes, for sure. So we consider collaboration to be the most important human technology, so to speak, right? It's what separates us most from other species and has led us most to advance, right?
So we need better ways to collaborate, right? We call it regular collaboration, we just need to improve how we collaborate, especially on the biggest challenge our generation is facing, right, which is climate change. And for that, that means developing new technologies that allow us to collaborate more efficiently, have common incentives, have common standards, let's say, common languages.
So the work we're doing in different silos, so to speak, can be done towards the same goal and there's not too much inefficiencies by having different groups working on different things.
So I think by actually finding ways to collaborate better, we can tackle this, which is a common problem in a common way, even if we have different subsets of the puzzle we're solving. So we're trying to find better ways to collaborate there, either by developing
working groups, developing new standards, new technologies, finding ways to make collaborative projects. So that's why we're evangelists of open source tech, open data, right? I think that's what we need for this type of...
And one of those working groups I was talking about is Climate Action Data 2.0, so CAD 2.0, if people want to participate in that, you can find it in wiki.climatedata.network or reach out at climatedata.openearth.org, just a group for people that are interested in climate data, join and try to find better ways to work together and make their work more impactful.
Yeah, so far we have emissions data, climate action data and contextual data for all
our actors, at least that's what we were trying to get for our actors, right? So we have for regions, which we call provinces or states, cities and corporates, right? So we have emissions data for them, which is for multiple sources and also multiple years. We have climate actions, which is what we call pledges or initiatives, commitments they've made publicly that they
want to reduce emissions or they want to reach net zero or they want to do something specific, right? So we also collect those and harmonize them also in a common schema so it's easy to track what people are committing to and then what also progress they're making.
We also have what we call contextual data, which is basically to better understand these type of actors. So for example, for political actors like countries, cities, its population, let's say GDP or the production they have, their surface area as well, right? So it's just better ways to describe that type
of actor so it's easy to at least understand a bit better how their emissions or we're trying to add more contextual data to go so that's like sort of like the more flexible one. So yeah, that's the data we have so far, and we're trying to first add more data but also other types of data as we go.
Right, yes, so as I was saying, main thing is getting more data, right? We just want to have all the data as possible to be easy to be accessed. We think that people care what's easy for them to care, right? So this data is hard to
get, hard to understand. People won't care as much so if we make it easy, we will care more. But that also means improving visualizations, right, that we have so it's easy to understand, improving access to data, so to download or use in different platforms,
doing a big push with corporate data, which I think is super relevant because it's super actionable, right? So getting more corporate data there. And the data we have is improving it so I think specialization to that I think is super relevant. And also adding ways to track data provenance, right, and verify that data is trustable.
So yeah, there's a lot of work to do, a lot of things we want to add. We invite anyone that wants to collaborate in this open source project, have any ideas, things you want to fix that you see should be fixed or things that you can add. Everyone's invited to participate. So, so yeah, we have, we have big plans to keep on expanding it.