SeismNet Manager: A Web Application to Manage Hardware and Data of a Seismic Network

Abstract

Modern seismic networks have grown to become increasingly complex infrastructures, composed of hundreds of devices and data streams scattered over wide geographic regions. Among the components of such networks are heterogeneous seismic and environmental sensors, digitizers, data loggers, data collection servers, wired and wireless communication hardware, and other devices and software subsystems charged with different data handling tasks, such as continuous data storage or analysis. In order to be effectively managed, a seismic network therefore needs a tiered software application. This application encompasses tasks that range from the low-level (hardware monitoring for failure detection) to the mid-level (data quality control) to the high-level (managing the final output of the network: recorded events, waveforms, and parametric data). At the same time such an application should provide a centralized and easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI). Over the past two decades, several institutions and commercial companies have devoted great efforts to the development of software tools to manage and centralize the data acquisition and analysis for regional to global seismic networks. Among the most valuable products worth mentioning are: Earthworm, an open-source real-time seismic management system developed by the U.S. Geological Survey (Johnson et al. 1995); Antelope, a commercial real-time system for environmental data collection, developed by Boulder Real Time Technologies (BRTT 2008); and the more recent SeisComP (Hanka et al. 2000), an open-source tool for real-time data acquisition and analysis developed by the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ-Potsdam). Although well-suited for real-time data collection and analysis, these systems do not currently provide advanced features for managing the infrastructure of a seismic network, such as state-of-health monitoring of the instrumentation or tracking all the network appliances.Trying to fill this gap, Instrumental Software Technologies (ISTI 2008) has recently developed SeisNetWatch (SeisNetWatch 2008), a tool for monitoring and controlling the data quality and the status of several types of data loggers and real-time seismic management systems. This desktop- and Web-accessible tool features a core system and a user interface written in Java, plus several “agents” each interacting with a particular piece of hardware or system. During the development of the Irpinia Seismic Network (ISNet) in southern Italy (Weber et al. 2007), we decided to address our needs of hardware monitoring and data management by developing our own solution, a Web-based application called SeismNet Manager. The application is designed as a graphical front-end to ISNet for internal and external users of the network, as well as its administrators, with an interface that is simple to use. SeismNet Manager leverages an instrument database and a seismic database to keep track of the hardware components that comprise the network (such as stations, servers, devices) and the data they produce (such as recorded waveforms and events). The application, universally accessible through a Web browser, fulfills the following needs: • to keep a detailed inventory of the multiple components that constitute a seismic network, including stations, sensors, data loggers, network hardware, generic hardware, data servers, and communication links; • to maintain a historical record of the installations and of the configuration details, as well as of the mutual connections of said components; • to perform real-time monitoring of some of the devices (hardware state and “health” problems, quality of the output) for alerting network operators of problems and complementing the seismic data; • to manage the seismic data produced by the network, obtained either through automatic data retrieval procedures or manual insertion by administrators (detected events, seismic recordings, parametric information) and to perform some routine tasks on returned data, including inspection, filtering, picking, and flagging. • to offer a Web-based interface that lets data consumers or network operators insert, edit, search, download and visualize all the available information (as tables, graphs, maps, waveform plots, and 3D renderings). To accomplish these goals, which are not specific to ISNet but are shared by most seismic networks, we made use of opensource technological solutions such as Linux (Debian 2008), PostgreSQL (PostgreSQL 2008), and Tomcat (Tomcat 2008). Flexibility and configurability was a priority, so that we could tailor SeismNet Manager to the specific needs and actual hardware of different networks and could manage multiple networks. At the same time, SeismNet Manager is not designed as a “be-all do-all” system performing every task needed in a seismic network, some of which are better left to specialized and standard software packages. For instance, in ISNet the continuous data acquisition and storage from the stations and the real-time seismic data processing for seismic early warning are implemented elsewhere, as discussed below. SeismNet Manager is thus built on top of the various elements and subsystems already operating in a network.