AMEE aims to be the “The world’s energy meter”, it:

• is a neutral, open platform for measuring the Energy Consumption of everything
• enables the calculation of the “Carbon-Footprint” of anything, and everything
• aggregates energy metrics, methodologies and conversion factors and CO2 data from over 150 countries
• is enabling to everyone who wishes define or engage with emerging standards
• is enabling to the creation of a down-stream Cap and Trade ecosystem
• is commercially enabling to Carbon Footprint and Energy Management software companies, Web Agencies, by providing standardised data and integrations.
• is commercially enabling to researchers and data owners who can syndicate their data via the platform
• is a common platform for profiling and transactions (there’s a transaction engine at the core of AMEE)
• is a “Web 2.0″ service applied to Climate Campaigning
• designed to save you time, effort and money; and increase transparency and trust in an increasingly complex arena

1. What does AMEE do?
2. What is your link with ActOnCO2/Defra/UK Government?
3. What about copyright? Are you “open source”?
4. What about security?
5. I’m a commercial data owner/research company, can I license my data through AMEE?
6. Does it cost anything?
7. Who else is involved and how will this service grow? What does AMEE stand for?
8. Who are you?
9. How do I contact you? Where do I start?

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1. What does it do?

AMEE is designed to

1. Provide a common platform for all kinds of Energy Profiling and Measurement, thus enabling accurate Carbon Footprinting;
2. Open up data, making it easy to access (using an “API“). This enables each campaign to create their own branded front-end to their campaigns, but rely on the same standard data.
3. Open up methodologies, part of our approach is like a “wikipedia for data” with tight peer-review - everyone can see exactly where the data came from, and why. We recognise and accommodate the fact that different organisations have different opinions on the underlying assumptions and data - we want to encourage open-ness and debate in this area to increase engagement with the issues
4. Provide a platform for profiling and transactions. Any project can use our anonymised profiling engine to store and track individual’s personal Energy Footprint. We can’t identify people individually - projects can identify only their users - but it does enable us to create broad, anonymous aggregated reports. We hope this approach will help projects work together to accelerate change.

2. What is your link with ActOnCO2/Defra/Government?

We have been working with Defra and various UK Government agencies to put their official data into the platform. The UK Government’s Act on CO₂ campaign (which launched on 20 June 2007) uses the AMEE platform for its own calculator.

The Act on CO₂ calculator uses a “frozen” version of the system to ensure it only uses, and is limited to the official Government data.

The full AMEE platform is far more broad and has a broad user base, including Google, EST, BRE and Morgan Stanley. The Irish Government uses the full AMEE platform for its country-wide initiative.

AMEE presents both this official UK data from more than 150 countries.

3. What about copyright? Are you “open source”?

Yes. We have agreed with UK Government to release its Crown Copyright data via the system. We also released all our software under General Public License (”GPLv3″). With any other data we add to the platform, we are encouraging (but not insisting!) contributors to adopt the Creative Commons “Non-commercial, Attribution, Share-Alike” license. We are also beginning to represent commercially licensed data via the platform, to enable scale and accelerate positive change.

We believe our approach is as open as it is possible to make it.

4. What about security?

Security and privacy were one of the founding design principles of AMEE - effectively we are storing your “energy identity”. To enable the platform to be transparent and maintain your privacy, we make all the profile data stored in AMEE anonymous. Our approach is similar in concept to OpenID and oAuth and we will continue to build our systems in this manner.

We push the responsibility of protecting your identity back to the branded service that you have signed up to (e.g. Defra, Google, Morgan Stanley, etc.). By splitting profile data from your name and/or e-mail address in this way: AMEE simply doesn’t know who you are - even if we were compromised an assailant would have to also hack the branded service in order to join the data back to you. We also obviously take our own businesses security as seriously as any data-based organisation should.

AMEE’s role as a neutral, 3rd party aggregator, can actually help to enhance system security by providing its robust, dedicated framework.

5. I’m a commercial data owner/research company, can I license my data through AMEE?
Yes. AMEE is a neutral aggregation platform. We would like to help you scale your business. AMEE has a clear focus as a web services provider. Some of our clients use AMEE as their sole database, others integrate with us.

We should save you time and money, and increase your reach. We are designed to be enabling to, not competitive with, your business. If you have any questions or concerns about this, please ask us.

6. Does it cost anything?

Yes (and no for certain types of organisation).

We run the whole platform as a managed service. This takes up our resources, staff, developers, time and effort. Please see our open contracts for more details.

Within reason, we don’t aim to charge for access to the platform for projects that have no budget and are non-commercial or won’t have significant scale. However, we are in a “preview” release phase and will discuss any fees on a case-by-case basis. We do ask for fees or contributions to provide our services as this enables us to run and improve the service.

Note that this a professional, enterprise-level service, as distinct from the software license described above. This means that anyone can have copies of the code and develop it further, assuming they apply the same licenses. We hope that using our managed service will result in a more cost-effective, faster and productive project and make more of a difference, but this is a choice.

7. Who else is involved and how will this service grow? What does ‘AMEE’ stand for?

We’ve been working on this since 2005. Our ambitions are broad and deep - to enable access to international data, product data, for personal, business, supply chain, products and industrial usage.

We have distributed access codes to 150+ organisations so far, and are incredibly excited about the potential to open up access to information and provide the AMEE platform as a basis for change.

AMEE is an acronym for “Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine”. We believe that by measuring, monitoring and acting on energy efficiency on a mass scale, we can substantially affect issues such as Climate Change, Peak Oil, Sustainability and Globalisation (all are inter-related).

8. Who are you?

AMEE UK Limited (UK) and AMEE Inc. (USA).

9. How do I contact you? Where do I start?

We would like to hear from you - there’s a lot to do. Please contact us if you are interested in getting involved.

a. Sign our Services Contract
b. You will need an API Key, which you can sign up for here.
c. Browse the data in our wiki. The wiki actually calls the AMEE API, so you are seeing the live data.
d. Read our technical documentation.
e. Join our (infrequent) mailing list.

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