Data Services Newsletter

Volume 17 : No 1 : Spring 2015

Event aggregator webpage displays comprehensive metadata and data products to drive discoverability

One of the missions of IRIS Data Services is provide timely, and easily consumable, information on recent regional and global earthquakes. To meet that goal, a web-based interface was developed that displays a list of events from the last 24 hours with links to a detailed page view displaying all the most publicly consumable data for that event. This includes:

  • event metadata: date and time, location, magnitude, depth
  • event location map
  • links to other user interfaces such as the Interactive Earthquake Browser
  • a waveform image recorded by the closest network station that recorded the event using the IRIS Timeseries web service
  • an audio conversion of the waveform created by the SeisSound data product
  • links to data for research purposes (download time series)

Event landing screenshot
Figure 1: Screenshot of the event landing page showing all events in the last 24 hours.

The popular SeisSound Data Product is embedded in the page and allows users to hear an audio-format conversion of the earthquake.

Event detail screenshot
Figure 2: Screenshot of an event detail page. Summary information about the event (the event metadata) is listed on the left-hand side. Data Services data products are embedded in the webpage with links to allow users to explore more detailed views.

The public web address (or URL) uses an internal event identification key that is used across IRIS and allows easy and permanent linking both from and to different user interfaces such as:

This drives discoverability across IRIS websites, allowing users to rapidly find the information they want in a format that is easily shareable.

by Rob Newman (IRIS Data Management Center) and Adam Clark (IRIS DMC)

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