Data Services Newsletter

Volume 14 : No 2 : Fall 2012

SPUD 2.0

Next generation of data product access

Recently, the IRIS DMC released version 2.0 of SPUD, the Searchable Product Depository. This latest version of the SPUD website provides many useful improvements that allow easier searching, browsing, and retrieval of data products managed at the DMC. In brief, the SPUD system has received a complete overhaul, which we hope leads to a more fluid and unobtrusive user experience.

Complementing the DMC’s repositories of time series recordings, the SPUD system primarily contains derivative data products of other types (images, movies, etc.) created either at the DMC or by the research community. SPUD is the query tool and access point for these products. The web interface allows users to search for products using customized queries by product and event. Users can search across all product types at once or within specific product types. SPUD also has a rich web service interface for programmatic discovery and access to these data products.

New features for this major release are:

  • Better map integration on query pages:
    1. Locations of products are mapped where available
    2. Clickable map icons w/ navigation (where appropriate)
  • Fully functional on Apple’s iPad™
  • More attractive (and useful) landing page
  • Introduction of an Event Detail page listing products associated with a specific seismic event
  • Faster data access and rendering
  • Query results sorting on various metadata fields
  • Improved menu system and general UI layout improvements

The major optimizations behind the scenes include:

  • Migration from MySQL™ database to PostgreSQL™
  • Web application container upgrade allowing container-managed database integration and caching
  • UI framework upgrade

Overall, we think the result is a site that is much easier, much faster and more fun to use. We hope that you will discover and appreciate our new look as you explore our rich catalog of data products.

Collage of SPUD screenshots
Figure 1: Collage of SPUD screenshots showing the landing webpage (rear), the event-based product query webpage (middle), and the detailed event page (top) for a M6.3 event in Southern Sumatra, Indonesia. The collage shows the different views available to access data, plus three of the products available for every event: moment tensor, event plots and USArray Ground Motion Visualization (GMV).

by Rich Karstens (IRIS Data Management Center) and Chad Trabant (IRIS DMC)

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