BXP – An open standard for atmospheric exposure data

Air pollution kills 7 million people a year. The sensors exist. The data infrastructure does not.

Every device, app, and agency stores air quality data in incompatible formats. A sensor in Accra cannot speak to a hospital in Nairobi. A researcher in London cannot access ground-truth data from Lagos. There is no open standard for atmospheric exposure data — the same way there was no open standard for the web before HTTP.

BXP (Breathe Exposure Protocol) is my attempt to fix that.

It defines: — A universal .bxp file format any device or software can read and write — BXP_HRI: a composite Health Risk Index incorporating all agents with WHO-derived weighting — A complete REST API specification for federated node networks — A privacy framework protecting individual exposure records by design

Like HTTP, PDF, or MP3 — BXP is a format layer. No hardware required. No licensing fees. No central owner. Apache 2.0. Forever free.

The reference implementation is live right now:

Live public node: https://bxp-node.onrender.com GitHub + full source: https://github.com/bxpprotocol/bxp-spec Spec DOI (Zenodo): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18906812 Implementation DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18907003

You can clone it and run your own BXP node in under 3 minutes:

git clone https://github.com/bxpprotocol/bxp-spec cd bxp-spec/reference-server pip install fastapi uvicorn pydantic python server.py

The spec covers 31 atmospheric agents — PM2.5, NO2, ozone, benzene, mold, heavy metals — with WHO thresholds, quality flags, geohash-based spatial indexing, and a federated network architecture where each node operator owns their own data completely.

I am looking for developers, researchers, and institutions who want to implement BXP, contribute to the spec, or run a community node. Particularly interested in connecting with anyone working on air quality infrastructure in developing countries where the data gap is most severe.

Happy to answer any questions.