Case studies

OpenQuake

Estimation and prediction system for earthquake damage

The request

The GEM Foundation is an association of public and private partners that guides the development and distribution of tools and resources all over the world for seismic risk assessment. Hundreds of organizations, professionals, and experts work together on global databases, methodologies, tools, and open-source software.

OpenQuake is a software that allows the estimation and prediction of economic and territorial damage caused by earthquakes in order to give indications on what the best actions could be to secure the areas at risk. OpenQuake is based on a historical database of urban data, building age, historical earthquakes, and historical damage that occurred in the affected areas. The database is not a typical SQL, but a set of diverse documents to be filtered and categorized and loaded onto the real database of the software that is accessible for predictions.

GEM asked Develer to develop (together with their own team) specific filters to add area data to the OpenQuake database. Working on OpenQuake has allowed us to develop part of the predictive platform code, collaborating with other international teams that were already active on the project, working with a visual to integrate it within a very structured software and with the typical architecture of an open source project.

Challenges faced

• Working with a remote team is likely to cause misunderstandings
• Integrating your work into a continuously developing code base may not be easy due to changes made by your colleagues

Solutions implemented

• Thanks to the purely Agile approach of the project, doubts and misunderstandings were clarified during the mid-morning daily meeting
• Keeping short iterations of a weekly duration meant that there were never big developments that were not yet integrated

Advantages of our solution

• Created software for data extraction from diverse documents
• Automatic classification of information on OpenQuake standard databases

Advantages of our approach

The type of project, distributed and based on open architecture, has allowed us to work easily with the Agile approach without any structural obstacle, making us highly productive from day one of development.

Advantages of open source

• Our corporate culture, which has always been oriented towards open source development methods, has allowed for an immediate integration with the staff of the OpenQuake project.
• OpenQuake code and algorithms are available on GitHub. This greatly facilitates distributed debugging and inspires greater confidence in its use, given the critical field in which it operates.

Staff