Publication Date:
2017-04-04
Description:
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.
Description:
Published
Description:
420-430
Description:
5.2. TTC - Banche dati di sismologia strumentale
Description:
JCR Journal
Description:
reserved
Keywords:
SeismNet Manager
;
Manage Hardware
;
04. Solid Earth::04.08. Volcanology::04.08.07. Instruments and techniques
;
05. General::05.02. Data dissemination::05.02.02. Seismological data
Repository Name:
Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV)
Type:
article
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