Beyond Earthworm: Keeping the Promise

Abstract

AbstractThe founding of the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) vision was originally presented in U.S. Geological Survey Circular 1188 (U.S. Geological Survey [USGS], 1999), after many years of discussions and workshops, described in detail by Filson and Arabasz (2016). Much has been accomplished in the ensuing two decades. Disparate and sometimes divergent developments that had been previously explored at individual private and public universities were finally centralized with increased efficiency and coherency of effort. The stated mission of the ANSS is to “… provide accurate and timely data and information products for seismic events, including their effects on buildings and structures, employing modern monitoring methods and technologies.” In this article, an approach (xQuake) is proposed that does not interfere in any way with the mission of the National Earthquake Information Center and ANSS but instead restores much of the community focus and international collaboration that has been lost over the past two decades. xQuake uses an executable graph framework in a pipeline architecture; this framework can be seamlessly integrated into current ANSS quake monitoring systems. This new approach incorporates modern approaches to computer analytics, including multitopic Kafka exchange rings, cloud computing, a self-configuring phase associator, and machine learning. The xGraph system is free for noncommercial use, open source, hardware agnostic (Windows, Linux, Mac), with no requirement for commercial datastores.