London

Britain is bidding to make the Royal Observatory at Greenwich the symbolic timekeeper of the Internet by launching Greenwich Electronic Time (GeT).

The bid is being led by a consortium of more than 4,000 European online retailers from 20 countries, known as the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG). IMRG hopes that GeT will become the standard time for all electronic commerce.

Consortium officials also say that GeT would smooth the path of electronic transactions on the Internet; at present, they argue, a lack of standardization in e-commerce means that goods can be owned by two parties at the same time.

Despite its name, GeT is not Greenwich Mean Time: it is another way of describing Co-ordinated Universal Time (UTC). Based on an agreement by more than 200 countries with atomic timekeeping, UTC uses an average of the time as measured by atomic clocks in these countries. It is so accurate that it occasionally needs to be adjusted with ‘leap seconds’ to match the slightly irregular rotation of the Earth.

UTC is already used worldwide, and is popular among the commercial and scientific sectors in the US. But although available on the Internet, its existence is not widely recognized.

“For me the benefit of the GeT project is the publicity and marketing, establishing that this is the time standard on which we need to operate on the Internet,” says John Laverty, head of the time section at the UK National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. He says there is “a lot of ignorance about what time standards are”, and hopes GeT will raise awareness of time “etiquette”.

Laverty has been advising IMRG about the new project. He says one of the reasons he is open to the idea is because of Swiss watchmaker Swatch's recent introduction of Biel Mean Time, which measures a day as 1,000 ‘beats’ and created a new meridian in Switzerland.

“They've taken the start of the universal day as Central European Time,” says Laverty. “This is convenient for Swatch headquarters, but if you are somewhere else in the world, dealing with Global Positioning System and UTC technology and your day starts at a different time, this is crazy.”

Details of the proposal for GeT can be found at: http://www.get-time.org .