Concept
The Network of Research Infrastructures for European Seismology (NERIES) is European Commission (EC) project whose focus is networking together seismological observatories and research institutes into one integrated European infrastructure that provides access to data and data products for research. Seismological institutes and organizations in European and Mediterranean countries maintain large, geographically distributed data archives, therefore this scenario suggested a design approach based on the concept of an internet service oriented architecture (SOA) to establish a cyberinfrastructure for distributed and heterogeneous data streams and services. Moreover, one of the goals of NERIES is to design and develop a Web portal that acts as the uppermost layer of the infrastructure and provides the rendering capabilities for the underlying sets of data. Through the portal users can surf and retrieve the data of interest, having access at the same time to a set of storage, processing and management facilities to be used with their own datasets.
Software Architecture
Each single application of the portal consists of a Java-based JSR-168-standard portlet (often provided with interactive maps for data discovery). In specific cases, it will be possible to distribute the deployment of the portlets among the data providers or institutes, such as seismological agencies or super computer centers, because of the adoption, within the distributed architecture of the NERIES portal of the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard for presentation-oriented web services.
All the portlets are connected to the underlying webservices infrastructure which adopts appropiate interfaces and formats, wrapping the middelware used by the seismological observatiries or institutes providing the data
QuakeML , RDF resources and URIs
The parametric information about a seismic event is delivered using a seismology-specific Extensible mark-up Language (XML) format called QuakeML (https://quake.ethz.ch/quakeml), which has been formalized and implemented in coordination with global earthquake-information agencies. Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) are used to assign identifiers to (1) seismic-event parameters described by QuakeML, and (2) generic resources, for example, authorities, locations providers, location methods, software adopted, and so on, described by a data model constructed with the resource description framework (RDF) and accessible as a webservice.
Events Parametric data are spread over several Oracle databases at the European-Mediterranean Seismological Center (RTS : Real Time data
and EMB : Euro-Med Bulletin). These data are merged under a unique identifier that will be important to link several material types within the portal and through the different data exchange
systems. This unique identifier (UNID) will create the seismic event URI used by the QuakeML documents.
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