[webservices] event query by catalog, no results for PDE for old time ranges

[David Simpson]

Web Service aficionados

	The question of how IRIS deals with catalogs and especially the issue of authoritative sources and preferred hypocenters has been of concern for some time. 

	The USGS is in the process of developing a comprehensive catalog (COMCAT) ( http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/epic/ ) that will eventually provide the dynamic updates (and rules of engagement) that some of you have indicated would be useful. This group should track that development and provide input to NEIC on how this develops and how it is linked to any parallel developments within the FDSN.  
	In the meantime, I do not think that IRIS should be the business of defining "preferred solutions" from multiple catalogs. 

	I would prefer that for use in selecting events for waveform collection (the primary IRIS DMC application) we should limit ourselves to a carefully defined set of no more than three catalogs (NEIC, ISC and GCMT) with a careful and well-understood definition of how they are used.  When using the ISC catalog, only the ISC processed and preferred solution should be used (these are clearly indicated in the ISC catalog). Under no circumstances should information about an event from one catalog be mixed with that from another catalog (e.g., magnitude or depth from GCMT mixed with location or origin time from another catalog). 
	This should avoid some of the confusion that is demonstrated under this current thread of discussion.

	It is fine for IRIS to archive and provide access to multiple catalogs, but complex algorithms for selecting, mixing and defining preferred solutions should be left to the user or done by others (i.e. ISC or NEIC). 

	David Simpson
	
	
On Mar 14, 2013, at 2:20 PM, Chad Trabant <chad at iris.washington.edu> wrote:

> 
> Hi,
> 
> This is also a bug and will be addressed in our soon-to-be released FDSN event service.  It was not as simple as searching the cached primary origins only, but a little deeper.
> 
> Thanks for reporting.
> 
> Chad
> 
> 
> On Mar 13, 2013, at 8:18 AM, Philip Crotwell <crotwell at seis.sc.edu> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Hi
>> 
>> This query (generated by the url builder) returns no events, even though there was a mag 7.6 earthquake in Turkey in that time range. Even odder, there is an origin in the NEIC PDE-M catalog for this event, originId=4908041, but it is not returned. 
>> 
>> http://www.iris.edu/ws/event/query?starttime=1999-08-17T00:00:00&endtime=1999-08-17T23:59:00&minmag=7&contributor=NEIC+PDE-M&orderby=time&output=xml
>> 
>> I am assuming that what happens is that I did not select "includeallorigins", and so this query only looked at "primary" origins. But it seems to me that if I say "use NEIC PDE-M", then the query should use that contributor even if it is no longer considered "primary".
>> 
>> I suppose "includeallorigins" is a workaround, but it seems counter intuitive to not be able to retrieve from a specific catalog/contributor.
>> 
>> thanks,
>> Philip
>> 
>> 
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