NERIES: WEB PORTAL DEVELOPMENTS FOR INTERACTIVE ACCESS TO EARTHQUAKE DATA ON A EUROPEAN SCALE

The Concept

The Network of Research Infrastructures for European Seismology (NERIES) is an EC project that aims at networking seismological observatories and research institutes into one integrated European infrastructure providing access to data and data products for research.

Within the NERIES project one of the requirements is to design and develop a web portal as the uppermost layer providing rendering capabilities for the underlying sets of data.

The Euro Mediterranean seismological institutes and organizations, for example data providers of seismological community, maintain large geographically distributed data archives and the NERIES portal needs to provide the access to these archives from a single web site through proper tools and services, enabling the broad earth science community and the public interactively access to earthquake data. This scenario suggested a design approach based on the concept of an internet Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Only recently this approach is being tested and implemented in Europe by the NERIES consortium and in the US by the Earthscope consortium. Here we present the current developments within NERIES.

Implementation
Key data formats: QuakeML, RDF Resources and UNID

The web services currently being designed and implemented will deliver the data adopting the appropriate formats. Events parametric information are delivered using a seismological specific XML format called QuakeML (https://quake.ethz.ch/quakeml), that has been formalized and implemented largely within the NERIES project itself, in coordination with global earthquake agencies. This data format uses URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers), to assign IDs to seismic event parameters and to generic resources; the former will be described by QuakeML documents and the latter (for example authorities, locations providers, location methods, software adopted etc), by instances of a data model defined in RDF (Resource Description Framework).

Moreover, in order to facilitate the exchange in Europe of the parametric information belonging to seismic events, the EMSC (European Mediterranean Seismological Center) has implemented a UNID (Unique event Identifier) that will form the events URIs used by the QuakeML data model. The Unique Identifier together with the URIs play an important role within the portal developments, and will be used to link and mesh-up the information retrieved from the different web services. Also the access to data such as waveform files (broadband waveform and accelerometric data) will be provided through a dedicated set of webservices acting as the http interface layer on top of the dedicated middleware hosted in the authoritative observatories.

Software Technologies and GUI

In order to achieve at the same time all the advantages of a GUI and of a programmatic access to the data, all the web services are meshed up to create different interactive applications. Each single application consists in a JSR-168 standard portlet plugged into the centralized NERIES portal, that is going to be implemented with the products available in the Open Source project “Apache Portals” (Jetspeed2,WSRP4J).

In specific cases it will be possible to distribute both the services and the portlets among the data provider thanks to the adoption of the WSRP standard for presentation oriented web services. This approach has been already implemented between EMSC and ORFEUS (Observatories and Research Facilities for European Seismology)

The GUI aims to provide to the user his own environment where he can surf and retrieve the data following a sort of workflow process. This process involves the interaction with dedicated tools in order to compose personalized datasets that can be downloaded or combined with other information available within the portal itself (for example, the same event catalogue composed by the user through a specific portlet, will be available also to other applications of the portal, obtaining information like, for example, moment tensors or waveform data volumes).