Federated data access and other services offered by the IRIS DMC

Abstract:

The IRIS Data Management Center (DMC) hosts mature web service interfaces that allow easy access to the vast archive of seismological and other data at the DMC. The core web services are conformant with the standard adopted by the International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks (FDSN) and provide access to time series, related metadata and earthquake parameters. With an increasing number of seismological data centers offering these same interfaces for their data sets, end users may use the same software to access data across data centers. Leveraging these standardized interfaces at multiple data centers, the DMC has developed a route resolution system that provides the routing logic to facilitate federated data access. The system comprises one interface that provides routing information for time series requests and another that provides routing information for metadata requests. These route resolution services accept requests as they would be submitted to an FDSN web service and return the selection separated into requests to be submitted to appropriate data centers. Using these services, a data access client can easily determine which portions of any given request should be directed to which data center. The routing results are returned in a form that is ready to be submitted to appropriate data centers, allowing multi-data center access to be integrated into even the simplest access software. Support for these routing services will be added to data access clients supported by the DMC. In addition to illustrating the details of this federation support system, we will present the status of other web service systems and data access methods at the DMC.

IRIS DMC Web Services: http://service.iris.edu