Open Data Hub

The Open Data Hub is a public, open database with information and data sets which are required for the environmental impact assessment of digital infrastructure. It enables digital infrastructure to determine its own environmental impact (using the Life Cycle Assessment methodology). The Open Data Hub provides the missing information, such a LCAs or EPDs of data center equipment, energy emission factors, required to calculate a sustainability scorecard and to operate an environmental data agent which attaches the environmental impact data to each digital resource produced by the digital infrastructure.

What data does the Open Data Hub deliver?

At the moment, we focus on a few key issues that help us to deliver our Digital Environmental Footprint work as well as the data required to deliver the Environmental Data Agent which in turn delivers sustainability dashboards for data centers who want to be transparent.

Life Cycle Assessments or Environmental Product Declarations for IT Equipment (server, network equipment, cabling)

A first approach available through our partner Boavizta’s API

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We have written an opinion piece towards OEMs and manufacturers of IT equipment on why such a database is needed. Read it on our blog →

Carbon Intensity of Electricity in different locations

Delivered by ElectricityMap.org

Life Cycle Assessments or Environmental Product Declarations for Data Center Equipment (backup generator, batteries, switchgear)

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At the moment there is a limited amount of EPDs available from data center equipment manufacturers, which is why we are actively advocating for the Product Environmental Passport (an EPD developed by the electrical equipment industry) to be adopted consistently.

📓Our PEP campaign

The technical architecture of the open data hub

Technically, the ODH is a versatile data store (combining unstructured and structured data in SQL, document-based and time-series databases) with a technical API as its ‘user interface’. It is powered by sustainable cloud infrastructure. At the moment, it provides mainly read-APIs to retrieve data sets on the topics specified above.

The Read APIs (and the underlying data sets) are all versioned so that the data structure can evolve without breaking any uses or applications that are build on top (backwards compatibility).