Toward Phase IV, Populating the WOVOdat Database

One of challenges for volcanologists is the fact that more and more people are likely to live on volcanic slopes. Information about volcanic activity during unrest should be accurate and rapidly distributed. As unrest may lead to eruption, evacuation may be necessary to minimize damage and casualties. The decision to evacuate people is usually based on the interpretation of monitoring data. Over the past several decades, monitoring volcanoes has used more and more sophisticated instruments. A huge volume of data is collected in order to understand the state of activity and behaviour of a volcano. WOVOdat, The World Organization of Volcano Observatories (WOVO) Database of Volcanic Unrest, will provide context within which scientists can interpret the state of their own volcano, during and between crises. After a decision during the 2000 IAVCEI General Assembly to create WOVOdat, development has passed through several phases, from Concept Development (Phase-I in 2000-2002), Database Design (Phase-II, 2003-2006) and Pilot Testing (Phase-III in 2007-2008). For WOVOdat to be operational, there are still two (2) steps to complete, which are: Database Population (Phase-IV) and Enhancement and Maintenance (Phase-V). Since January 2009, the WOVOdat project is hosted by Earth Observatory of Singapore for at least a 5-year period. According to the original planning in 2002, this 5-year period will be used for completing the Phase-IV. As the WOVOdat design is not yet tested for all types of data, 2009 is still reserved for building the back-end relational database management system (RDBMS) of WOVOdat and testing it with more complex data. Fine-tuning of the WOVOdat’s RDBMS design is being done with each new upload of observatory data. The next and main phase of WOVOdat development will be data population, managing data transfer from multiple observatory formats to WOVOdat format. Data population will depend on two important things, the availability of SQL database in volcano observatories and their data sharing policy. Hence, a strong collaboration with every WOVO observatory is important. For some volcanoes where the data are not in an SQL system, the WOVOdat project will help scientists working on the volcano to start building an SQL database.