Unleashing the power of green data

Footprinted.org gives sustainability practitioners easy access environmental information.

Footprinted.org is working to give sustainability decision-makers access to open environmental impact data.

Sustainability practitioners know that quantitative environmental research is the cornerstone of sound decision-making. But these results are too often found in closed, costly databases based on proprietary software. Even when it’s readily available, environmental information may be presented in text documents and.pdf files that makes data extraction and formatting a clumsy process.

KTH’s new open, web-based service Footprinted.org is designed to make things simpler.

"Environmental information should be accessible and easy to use. That’s why we’ve developed Footprinted.org," says Jorge Zapico a Ph.D student at the KTH Centre for Sustainable Communication (CESC).
Environmental research results are available free of charge in Footprinted, and data is stored in a format that can easily be modified to enable development of new services -- anyone can create, present, share and reuse the information. Various sources of research are presented transparently. And unlike closed databases, Footprinted does not apply a unique answer approach.

"It’s a bazaar of environmental impact information, rather than a cathedral", explains Zapico.

In its current version, Footprinted provides a repository of life cycle assessments of various materials, products and processes. The next step in developing the service is to include footprints for individual consumer products.

Footprinted is the result of a design research process within the Data Driven Sustainability project and is currently available in beta version at www.footprinted.org. Footprinted is a collaboration between the KTH Centre for Sustainable , Sourcemap Inc. and MIT Media Lab. Footprinted will be presented on 6 October 2011 at the EnviroInfo Conference in Ispra/Italy.

Peter Händel wants you to make your mobile phone a part of the car’s dashboard. The KTH Professor of Signal Processing has helped create a new mobile application for safer and more efficient driving. “In the public debate, drivers are often warned about using a mobile phone while driving, but I say the opposite: your mobile phone should be seen as an extension of the car’s dashboard.”

The odyssey of dogs and dingoes from China to Polynesia and Australia can now be mapped. KTH genetic researchers Peter Savolainen and Mattias Oskarsson have presented a new study showing how the domestic dog accompanied humans across the islands of Southeast Asia.

The chief executives of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A., and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, have formally announced a long-term strategic alliance designed to benefit students and faculty at both institutions. The agreement on academic and research cooperation seeks to engage the civic communities and economic interests of both Sweden and the state of Illinois.