Abstract
An increasing number of web services providing convenient access to seismological data have become available in recent years. A huge effort at multiple levels was required to achieve this goal and the seismological community was engaged in the standardization of both data formats and web services. Although access to seismological data is much easier than in the past, users encounter problems because of the large number of web services, and due to the complexity of the discipline-specific data encodings. In addition, instead of adopting cross-disciplinary standards such as those by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), most seismological web services created their own standards, primarily those by the International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks (FDSN). This article introduces “QQuake,” a plugin for QGIS—the Open Source Geographic Information System—that aims at making access to seismological data easier. The plugin is based on an Open Source code available on GitHub, and it is designed in a modular and customizable way, allowing users to easily include new web services.
Highlights
Since natural phenomena do not follow administrative boundaries, seismology has had a longstanding tradition of open data sharing
As opposed to the text output provided by any of the Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks (FDSN) services where the list of fields and related labels is fixed, when a web service output data using any of the supportedXML-based data standard, the plugin allows the user to decide the fields to be included in the QGIS layer
QQuake fits the scenario depicted by the EPOS ERIC and its effort of creating a common platform for all European organisations dealing with Earth sciences
Summary
Since natural phenomena do not follow administrative boundaries, seismology has had a longstanding tradition of open data sharing. QQuake, a QGIS Plugin for Loading Seismological Data the data encoding formats respectively for web services dedicated to earthquake parameters (fdsnws-event), and for web services for seismic station information (fdsnws-station). Web services standards developed and promoted by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC; https:// www.ogc.org/) are not tight to a specific field of Science and are meant to offer a solid interoperability framework for sharing geospatial data.
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