Metastring Foundation – Democratizing data for India's data-driven decision making

ABOUT

India is at the threshold of a new wave where a billion citizens will have cheap data connectivity, and be consumers as well as producers of digital data.

Metastring aims to ride this digital wave to build the largest repository of democratized digital data (in the domains of its focus). Our goal is to support data-driven decision making to improve the quality of life of the citizens of India.

We will serve as trustees of the data. We will catalyze,  bring together stakeholders, build partnerships, connect the dots, tie the loose ends, incentivize, gamify, whatever it takes, to instigate the largest democratized digital data revolution in history. We will help identify and build the right technology platforms & solutions, and to enable the right open tools to extract value from this data repository.

ORIGINS, HISTORY & VISION

Conceived by the founders of Strand Life Sciences (SLS), who are academic entrepreneurs from the Indian Institute of Science, and committed to creating value in Indian society.

Strand Life Foundation was set up in 2014 as a not-for profit Section 8 company to build platforms and leverage technology for social development.

Founders of Strand Life Sciences

The Foundation was incubated at the SLS in its early years and in 2018 was transformed into the Metastring Foundation to accelerate and pursue its single objective of leveraging technology for aggregating and democratizing data.

FOCUS

Our current focus is in Biodiversity and Health Care. But our interests are wider and diverse. We are interested in aggregating data and making data speak in areas of human development and civil society. We have interests in sustainable agriculture, education, employment and livelihoods to name a few and are always willing to explore newer domains where data can be a public good to drive policy and action.

Blue Grass Dartlet (Pseudagrion microcephalum) Photo: Sunny Joseph
(CC BY 3.0)

BIODIVERSITY

The India Biodiversity Portal is a participative and collaborative technology platform for aggregating biodiversity information on India.

The platform was incubated and developed at Strand Life Sciences (SLS) since 2008 as a collaborative effort with many partners. It is today the largest comprehensive biodiversity information platform for India.

The open source code base ‘biodiv’ powers the Bhutan Biodiversity Portal and a knowledge portal for weeds. Metastring Foundation is the custodian of the of the open source platform and is involved in administration, running, maintenance and co-developing features on the biodiv platform. It consists of a fully-featured webGIS module, a standards compliant species pages module, a document and open data module, and a citizen science observation module.

HEALTHCARE

Metastring Foundation is the technology partner responsible for the Open Platform for Rare Diseases OPFORD. It works closely with the OPFORD Foundation to develop, document, network and provide an information platform for rare diseases.

An estimated 70 million children and adults in India suffer from some rare disease and support systems are inadequate. Metastring is committed to supporting patients with rare diseases by leveraging technologies for their betterment. Currently 28 rare diseases are documented on the OPFORD platform. The intent is for the platform to evolve as a dynamic and interactive information system with detailed and extensive information on rare diseases and treatments and provide an online active patient support system.