EMERGING WEB SERVICES AT THE IRIS DATA

IRIS Background

New demands for interdisciplinary science have broadened the data delivery mission for the IRIS Data Management Center. In the past the DMC has been charged with archiving seismic waveform data and making it available to download primarily via batched mechanisms. In recent years we have seen the successful addition of a CORBA-RPC mechanism named DHI (Data Handling Interface). The mission of IRIS has now been expanded to delivering more general data products, usable by non-domain experts. Many of the building blocks to create these data already exist, but in their current format are difficult to combine. At the DMC we are working to expose these existing capabilities and develop new ones, linking them together with workflows to create a web-based service-oriented architecture. The DMC began providing web services two years ago with pilot projects exposing data access and analysis through web services. A new tool, SPADE (Searchable Product Archive and Discovery Engine) uses web services both for data submission and discovery. Enabling inter-organizational collaborations is one of the strengths of web services, and IRIS has been working the UNAVCO and the Marine Geology Data System at LDEO on the GeoWS project (http://www.geows.org). The GeoWS project aims to bring together data sets from the three organizations by means of OGC-standard mapping technologies. Some of the DMC's existing capabilities that will be exposed as services include data format conversion, plotting and phase analysis. New tools will include hypocenter and tomographic retrieval and visualization. Our long-term aim is to provide reusable, composable services with programmatic and interactive interfaces, enabling users to easily customize seismic data access. The flexibility of a service-oriented architecture will enable the IRIS DMC to respond effectively to technology changes and demands from the geosciences community.

IRIS Earthquake Hypocenter Web Service for use with the GEON IDV

The GEON IDV (Integrated Data Viewer) (http://geon.unavco.org/unavco/IDV_for_GEON.html) is a powerful, free, Java based, desktop application that allows 3D visualization of complex solid earth science data. The GEON IDV can display earthquake hypocenters encoded in NetCDF. We have developed a REST style web service for generating such data. The service can rapidly query our earthquake event tables for events in latitude-longitude bounding boxes and date ranges. Our event tables contain millions of events from multiple contributors and span the time range 1964 to present. The web service is coupled with an easy to use map based, web application that allows users to quickly discover what events are in our tables and to download the information in the NetCDF format. This should be a useful tool for educators, scientists, and students.