MIDOP - Macroseismic Intensity Data Online Publisher

Abstract

Within the activities of the Networking Activity 4 (NA4) module called “Distributed Archive of Historical Earthquake Data” of the European Commission NERIES project, a massive quantity of historical earthquakes related data is being published online. The NA4 working team is composed of many researchers coming from five European National Institutions. The retrieved data ranges from year 1000 to year 1900 and covers all of Europe. One of the fundamental components of historical seismology research is the so called “macroseismic intensity data” which describes the level of damage caused by an earthquake in a list of places. Usually these data come in form of printed maps and/or tables; only rarely data are available in digital form. Among other tasks, the NA4 working team is dedicated to publishing maps representing retrieved material. Until now no dedicated software for online map publishing existed and general purpose solutions were adopted. However a macroseismic map requires a series of additional information such as explanation on the sources used, detailed places information and representation of the level of damage using special glyph. These requirements are of difficult implementation using out-of-the-box tools, resulting in extremely time-consuming hard to do customization and manual operations, tasks that NERIES NA4 couldn’t afford. To solve the situation the working team decided to create MIDOP, a specific tool that allows webinexperienced researchers to easily transform unappealing tables into deeply customized interactive maps. A completely coding-free approach has been adopted sporting a user friendly web interface capable of generating entire websites from scratch. Once a website has been created, its publication on the web is easy as dragging a folder to the final web server. Thanks to its SVG and JavaScript integration the web server will only manage static pre-generated pages, resulting in a secure and lightweight web application from the server point-of-view. Only the client computer resources will be used when users require actions such zoom, pans or mapped places search. The MIDOP tool is based on open source solutions such as JavaScript, PHP and MySQL and extensively uses SVG for visual representation and interaction. The tool is being released under an open source license. This document is a comprehensive final user manual.