Seismogis: a Tool for the Visualization of Earthquake Data

SeismoGIS is a GIS toolset developed for the Earthquake Observatory Bensberg of the University of Cologne. The system supports the analysis and visualization of current and past earthquake events measured by the seismometer station network. The Toolset consists of (i) an extension for ESRI’s ArcGIS, developed in C#, (ii) an online GIS using the UMN MapServer software and (iii) a small PHP web application for dynamic KML data generation. The software parses dynamically the measured earthquake events from an ASCII file, which is supplied by the SEISAN / SEISNET software. For further use within the SeismoGIS, these parsed event datasets get stored in a MySQL database with 17 fields each. In this contribution we present an overview of the system architecture of SeismoGIS. In addition, the database design and the management of the GIS data, the single components e.g. the tools with its architecture, implementation details, and an overview of the provided functionality to the user are described. Finally a preview on considered future work is given.