Accessing Data from the ISC
A Surguy and R J Willemann
Poster Presentation in Thompson Hall on Wed 28 July at 09:00
The ISC has distributed its data in print, as the Bulletin and Catalogue, since its inception. We have provided data in digital format on custom-written tapes and other media since early in the Centre's history and we continue to provide outcomes from specialised searches of our data. During this period, the Centre established a policy of distribution at a price just sufficient to cover the cost of reproduction. Starting in 1995, we released a series of CDs that now provide our complete data set in computer-readable form, at lower cost than custom products. Since 1997, we have made all of our analysed data freely available on the Internet from our web site.
In the future we plan to continue improving the accessibility of our data and the ease of integrating it with other data. New query tools on our web site will provide greater flexibility in selecting data. We have implemented mechanisms to generate focused links to other Internet nodes and insert them in our on-line Bulletin. The objective is not to merely tell users of other data sources, but to link them directly to a moment tensor, waveform collection or velocity model needed for further analysis of the event they have found in the Bulletin. We are working with other seismic data centres to help define more widely useful standards for data exchange and CORBA-compliant object classes. We are evaluating the possibility of distributing functions written in Fortran, C and other languages to allow users to more easily access our data from within their own programs.
