Global Federation of Data Services in Seismology: Extending the Concept to Interdisciplinary Science

Abstract:

The International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks (FDSN) sets international standards, formats, and access protocols for global seismology. Recently the availability of an FDSN standard for web services has enabled the development of a federated model of data access. With a growing number of internationally distributed data centers supporting identical web services the task of federation is now fully realizable. This presentation will highlight the advances the seismological community has made in the past year towards federated access to seismological data including waveforms, earthquake event catalogs, and metadata describing seismic stations.

As part of the NSF EarthCube project, IRIS and its partners have been extending the concept of standard web services to other domains. Our primary partners include Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory (marine geophysics), Caltech (tectonic plate reconstructions), SDSC (hydrology), UNAVCO (geodesy), and Unidata (atmospheric sciences). Additionally IRIS is working with partners at NOAA’s NGDC, NEON, UTEP, WOVODAT, Intermagnet, Global Geodynamics Program, and the Ocean Observatory Initiative (OOI) to develop web services for those domains. The ultimate goal is to allow discovery, access, and utilization of cross-domain data sources.

IRIS and a variety of US and European partners have been involved in the Cooperation between Europe and the US (CoopEUS) project where interdisciplinary data integration is a key topic.