QQuake logo QQuake

Current version 1.7

A plugin for QGIS 3.x that relies on web services for loading seismological data

The plugin supports the following standards:

Web services allow users to get data, not caring for data storage, data filtering and with little or no problems related to obscure data encodings conversions.

Since their introduction, web services providing seismological data increased the accessibility to a huge amount of open data, opening new possibilities especially for those users developing automatic analysis procedures.

Even if their use has increased during these last few years, many users are left unsatisfied by the additional complexity required to deal with queries, obscure XML files, much more complicated than simpler files with a data table.

In order to expand the user base of web services even further, we decided to investigate the potential of a direct access to seismological data for GIS users, with a strong emphasis on a convenient and user-friendly tool. We selected QGIS as a target application, because it is widely spread, it is well documented, its support community is vibrant, and it is an Open Source software.

At the beginning of 2019 we started drafting the features of a plugin for QGIS able to support web services based on standard promoted by the International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks (FDSN) which are widely adopted in the seismological community. In fact, up to now users were able to include easily only data provided via Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web services (most notably WMS or WFS) because they are supported out-of-the-box by QGIS.

By design, the plugin takes advantage of the already available web services, but instead to tie it up to a specific service endpoint, we support a web service standard, so the user is free to add its own services. To simplify furthermore the use of such a plugin, we provide a set of pre-configured web services, specifically those managed by our research institute called Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV).

The development of the plugin started in November 2019, in collaboration with a private company called Faunalia, with the financial support of the European project SERA, and later continued with the support of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers- Italian Civil Protection Department (DPC).

The first public release of QQuake was published in December 2020.

Citing QQuake

Locati M., Vallone R., Ghetta M. and Dawson N. (2021). QQuake, a QGIS Plugin for Loading Seismological Data From Web Services. Front. Earth Sci. 9:614663. https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2021.614663

 

DISCLAIMER

Data retrieved using this plugin is provided under the responsibility of the data provider managing each web service.
Neither INGV, nor the plugin authors are responsible for the use that might be made of the data retrieved, nor are they responsible for any damage to third-parties caused by conclusions based on these data.
Data retrievied using the plugin may be altered with respects to the original data provided from the web services due to data reprocessing required to load data into QGIS (typically for converting the XML hierarchical structure into a table).
The plugin should be considered experimental.

 

This project was partially funded by

This plugin is released with a GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, Version 3, 29 June 2007