Seismological data networks and services in Europe

The Seismic Data Portal (http://www.seismicportal.eu) provides a collection of tools to discover, visualize, and access a variety of seismological data sets, including earthquake parameters, broadband and accelerometric data, European tomography, and historical earthquake catalogs. The Portal was developed as part of the Network of Research Infrastructures for European Seismology project, which was funded under the 6th European Framework Programme to integrate data and service resources for the seismological community. The NERIES project brought together 25 participating institutions and organizations under 19 work packages to produce numerous scientific results through coordinated research, development, networking, and integration activities. The Seismic Data Portal provides a single point of access to the heterogeneous and distributed data sets developed or made available through the NERIES project. These tools operate in a coordinated manner to provide a cohesive distributed search environment, linking data search and access across multiple data providers. Through interactive, map-based tools, a researcher is able to build queries linking event parametric data with seismological broadband or accelerometric waveform data. The Portal architecture is based on a suite of standards and standard technologies, allowing interoperability between tools and the integration of new tools as they become available. The data tools are supported by web services running at their respective data centers. These web services provide the programmatic interface between the interactive, web-based tools, and the underlying data archives. Moreover they are in turn available to external applications, allowing direct programmatic queries to the data archives. Work on the Data Portal, access tools, and services architecture will continue under other EU funded projects. The NERA, Network of European Research Infrastructures for Earthquake Risk Assessment and Mitigation project, funded under the 7th European Framework Program, will bring into the Data Portal new extensions to include new data sets and access tools from new partners in the Seismology and Earthquake Engineering communities. We will implement a Common Services Architecture based on OGC services APIs. This services layer API provides Resource-Oriented common interfaces across the data access and processing services to improve interoperability between tools and across projects, enabling the development of higher-level applications that can uniformly access the data and processing services of all participants. The effort for such extensions of the current Data Portal will be conducted jointly with another EU funded project VERCE - Virtual Earthquake and Seismology Research Community for Europe. VERCE aims to enable seismologists to exploit the wealth of seismic data within a data-intensive computation framework, which will be tailored to the specific needs of the community. It will provide a new interoperable infrastructure, as the computational backbone laying behind the publicly available interfaces.