Data Services Newsletter

Volume 15 : No 1 : Summer 2013

Software updates at the DMC

JWEED 4.1 release

JWEED 4.1 is a useful Java client that allows users to easily access earthquake data, look at waveforms, and send requests to download data in various formats. It works seamlessly with FDSN web services and is capable of being configured to access other external FDSN web services from a simple configuration window. JWEED 4.1 provides improved usability and performance over earlier versions and is worth a look. If you are someone who routinely likes to view data from earthquakes or watch data stream onto the screen in near real-time, JWEED can do both.

Figure 1 - Screenshot of JWEED 4.1
Figure 1: Screenshots of JWEED 4.1. This latest version of JWEED hooks into the new FDSN Web Services.

Retirement of data access services

Three forms of data access at the IRIS DMC are being retired or going through a transition.

Networked Data Centers (NetDC)

Since 1997, NetDC has served the user community by providing federated access to seismic data among a number of worldwide data centers. It uses a standard email request format and supports concatenation of data at the host server for delivery to the user. Though this tool has proven useful to a number of users over the years, we feel it is time to retire this system at the DMC to make room for newer forms of data access. NetDC will be retired at the IRIS DMC on September 30th, 2013, but we will continue to provide a link to other centers by way of the fdsn.org domain, provided we find an institution to host the traffic.

The Data Handling Interface (DHI)

The DHI is a CORBA service that supplies seamless networked access to data and metadata using well-defined interfaces. DHI has been in operation since 2002 and has served a number of different clients quite well over the years. Because of the popular emergence of web services at IRIS DMC, we are retiring support of DHI at our data center on September 30th, 2013 and currently have the servers in a non-maintenance mode.

WILBER 2

WILBER 2 is being retired, along with its POND archive, the FARM, and the UVFARM, on September 30th, 2013. The good news is that Wilber 3 is now available for beta evaluation and is expected to be fully-feature complete in September. WILBER has been a fixture at IRIS DMC since about 1998, and underwent a major modification in 2001. WILBER clones have been in use at a number of other data centers around the world and are still running to this day. IRIS DMC is continuing this legacy with Wilber 3, which now leverages the latest in JavaScript capabilities and data rich web services to provide users a very easy-to-use earthquake data browser right on the web. Please read the article in this newsletter on the latest features available in Wilber 3.

by Rob Casey (IRIS Data Management Center)

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