[webservices] Location ID change for the DMC's fdsnws-station service in December

[Chad Trabant]

Hello web service users,

Working Group II of the FDSN, the governing body of the SEED and StationXML formats, has decided that empty location IDs in StationXML must be represented by an empty string.  This decision means that the StationXML, and implicitly the text output, from the DMC's fdsnws-station service is non-compliant.

To address this, we are planning on changing the output from our fdsnws-station service in the 2nd half of December after the fall AGU.  This change may effect end users depending on how you are processing data or if you are managing the metadata on your own.

Currently our service returns empty location IDs as a string containing two spaces.  Following the service update, empty location IDs with change as follows:

a) for StationXML: the locationCode attribute of a Channel element will be an empty string.  For example: locationCode="  " will become locationCode="".

b) for the channel-level text output: the field for location will be collapsed to nothing.  For example, with the delimiting vertical bars: "|  |" will become "||".

The latest versions of the DMC's access software support either the two-space or empty string representations synonymously.

The IRIS-WS Java library (and consequently the irisFetch.m MATLAB interface):
http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/software/downloads/IRIS-WS/

The DMC's Fetch scripts:
https://seiscode.iris.washington.edu/projects/ws-fetch-scripts

We apologize for any inconvenience this change will cause.

regards,
IRIS DMC
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