Easy Discovery and Access of Data from Multiple Data Centers Through Federation

The IRIS Data Management Center (DMC) is the largest public repository of passive-source seismic data in the world with nearly ½ petabyte archived and available. Approximately that same volume of seismic data, from different stations, is publicly available from other seismological data centers. Until relatively recently the discovery and collection of data across centers required researchers to contact each center individually, often using different mechanisms. About 5 years ago the International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks (FDSN)¹ adopted a standard web service specification for access to data in standard formats. In the years afterward, multiple data centers have implemented these interfaces. To leverage these standard services and formats, the DMC created the IRIS Federator in order to integrate federated data discovery and access into our tools. The public interface to the Federator is the irisws-fedcatalog² web service, which provides a search capability of time series data across multiple data centers. We initially integrated federated data access into our FetchData³ and MATLAB(r)³ tools and the community maintained ObsPy⁴ Python framework. We have more recently integrated federated access into Wilber⁵, a web application for selecting and downloading data event-oriented data, the Metadata Aggregator⁶, a web application for browsing metadata and GMap⁷, a station mapping service. We will present the latest status of these tools and our plans to continue building tools for federated data access. Ultimately, these efforts will make more data more discoverable, accessible, and usable for all researchers.

- International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks: http://www.fdsn.org/

- IRIS Federator, irisws-fedcatalog web service: https://service.iris.edu/irisws/fedcatalog/1/

- IRIS web service tools: https://service.iris.edu/clients/

- ObsPy, Python framework for seismological data: http://www.obspy.org/

- Wilber, event-oriented data access: https://ds.iris.edu/wilber3

- Metadata aggregator: https://ds.iris.edu/mda/

- Station mapping service: http://ds.iris.edu/gmap/