The building up process of a macroseismic intensity database

Abstract

Since the late nineties Italy has a well-established tradition of making available on the Internet a national macroseismic intensity database. The last updated version called DBMI11 was released in December 2011. By using this public database everyone can obtain information about the effects caused in a populated place by an earthquake of the past. A huge quantity of well organised historical information can be effortlessly retrieved and used as the background information of the seismic hazard assessment. Other similar activities are carried out by the same DBMI working group: the creation of a transnational European database called AHEAD (Archive of historical Earthquake Data) and the related effort of supporting the growth of other European intensity databases (Catalonia, Spain, Portugal, Greece and UK) and, at world-wide scale, the support for the "Global Earthquake History", the GEM (Global Earthquake Model) global component. This presentation will describe how these databases are built, how they are structured and which tools are used both for managing data and for the Internet publication.