Standardization of Seismic Tomographic Models and Earthquake Focal Mechanisms Datasets Based on Web Technologies, Visualization with Keyhole Markup Language

Abstract

We present two projects in seismology that have been ported to web technologies, which provide results in Keyhole Markup Language (KML) visualization layers. These use the Google Earth geo-browser as the flexible platform that can substitute specialized graphical tools to perform qualitative visual data analyses and comparisons. The Network of Research Infrastructures for European Seismology (NERIES) Tomographic Earth Model Repository contains datasets from over 20 models from the literature. A hierarchical structure of folders that represent the sets of depths for each model is implemented in KML, and this immediately results into an intuitive interface for users to navigate freely and to compare tomographic plots. The KML layer for the European-Mediterranean Regional Centroid-Moment Tensor Catalog displays the focal mechanism solutions or moderate magnitude Earthquakes from 1997 to the present. Our aim in both projects was to also propose standard representations of scientific datasets. Here, the general semantic approach of XML has an important impact that must be further explored, although we find the KML syntax to be more shifted towards detailed visualization aspects. We have thus used, and propose the use of, Javascript Object Notation (JSON), another semantic notation that stems from the web-development community that provides a compact, general-purpose, data-exchange format.