[webservices] New FDSN web services and retirement of deprecated services

[Chad Trabant]

Hi John,

Regarding 1) if you follow the links on the first page you indicate you will find that the actual earliest data is more recent and dependent on the format (ehdf goes back to 1990, mchedr goes to 1981, ISF goes to 1990 and manuscript goes to 1994); what we loaded happens to only go back to 1990 unfortunately.  This issue was moot when we were mixing the solutions from the ISC and PDE.

We are considering an alternative approach of allowing the default catalog to change depending on the availability of catalog coverage.  In particular, the default catalog for older events would be ISC and if it is not present the default would be NEIC PDE.  This would be done without mixing information from different catalogs for any single event, but allow retrieval of information spanning the two catalogs and time ranges.  Your thoughts on this idea would be appreciated.

Regarding 2), yes we are aware that searching the ISC catalog using our service is now much slower.  This is due to not being able to use the caching solution we had developed and been using for a long time as it was built around the concept of mixed catalogs.  We are investigating other methods and I'm optimistic we can speed up access to all catalogs.

Chad

On Mar 28, 2013, at 3:13 PM, John Taber <taber at iris.edu> wrote:

> Chad,
> 
> It's great to see that you have the new FDSN web services up and running and Russ is already using them in the new version of IEB that he is working on.  I've been trying it out via IEB and also the URL builder, and I've got a couple of questions.
> 
> 1. The default NEIC PDE catalog only goes back to 1990, but on the USGS site, the PDE catalog goes back to 1973 ( http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/data/pde.php or http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/epic/ ).  Is there any chance of adding the earlier years?   This would make IEB much more useful.
> 
> 2.  I understand you are aware that selecting another catalog slows the search down such that it can take minutes in some cases, which might be okay for some uses but it means the ISC catalog couldn't be selected for use in IEB, which was something David was hoping for (as long as it is the reviewed bulletin).  Do you think it will be possible to speed up the use of other catalogs?  
> 
> Thanks for your help,
> 
> John
> 
> On Mar 27, 2013, at 4:43 PM, Chad Trabant wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Hello web services users,
>> 
>> We are pleased to announce that the IRIS DMC has implemented the International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks (FDSN) versions of our core web services that support access to time series data, related metadata and event parameters.  The equivalent DMC services are now deprecated and will be retired, read more on that below.
>> 
>> The FDSN service specification defines an internationally recognized, standard interface.  Programs that access data via these FDSN web services should also be compatible with any other data center implementing FDSN interfaces.  There are a few, clearly marked IRIS extensions to the functionality that may not be implemented elsewhere.
>> 
>> These are an evolutionary step forward for DMC services and improve on what they are replacing in important ways.  For example, the time series web service now supports wildcards, and much more flexibility in selection style (supporting both GET and POST submissions and comma separated lists for channel name fields).
>> 
>> 
>> The fdsnws-dataselect service returns selected time series in miniSEED format:
>> http://service.iris.edu/fdsnws/dataselect/1/
>> 
>> The fdsnws-station service returns selected station metadata in FDSN StationXML and text formats:
>> http://service.iris.edu/fdsnws/station/1/
>> 
>> The fdsnws-event service returns selected event parameters in QuakeML and text formats:
>> http://service.iris.edu/fdsnws/event/1/
>> 
>> Our FDSN web services are available from a dedicated host name with new web documentation:
>> http://service.iris.edu/
>> 
>> Comments, feedback and questions are welcome.
>> 
>> 
>> == Transitioning clients to the FDSN services
>> 
>> The DMC has converted it's Perl-based Fetch scripts to use these new services, the latest version may be downloaded from here:
>> 
>> http://service.iris.edu/clients/
>> 
>> The transition of the IRIS Java Web Services library and the irisFetch.m for MATLAB are currently in progress.
>> 
>> 
>> == Deprecation of equivalent IRIS services
>> 
>> With the release of our FDSN services we are deprecating the equivalent services.
>> 
>> These services will be turned off in approximately 6 months:
>> 
>> ws-bulkdataselect (www.iris.edu/ws/bulkdataselect)
>> ws-dataselect (www.iris.edu/ws/dataselect)
>> ws-station (www.iris.edu/ws/bulkdataselect) 
>> ws-event (www.iris.edu/ws/event) 
>> 
>> 
>> == Differences between FDSN and the services they are replacing
>> 
>> The FDSN web services return HTTP status code 204 to indicate "No data" as opposed to status code 404 used by the services they are replacing.  The behavior of returning a 404 can be restored by including the 'nodata=404' parameter and value in the request.
>> 
>> fdsnws-dataselect is a combination of the capabilities of ws-bulkdataselect and ws-dataselect:
>>  1) enhancement: the network, station, location and channel selections may be comma-separated lists (e.g. BHE,BHN)
>>  2) enhancement: the network, station, location and channel selections may contain * and ? wildcards
>>  3) should be a drop-in replacement for ws-bulkdataselect (accepts the same requests via POST).
>>  4) a near complete replacement for ws-dataselect (accepts GET requests with parameters) except that it does not support the 'ref' parameter and does not support caching in the internal ICAB system.
>> 
>> fdsnws-station is equivalent to ws-station with these important changes:
>>  1) the XML output is returned as FDSN StationXML, a different schema
>>  2) new 'matchtimeseries' parameter to limit results to channels with high probability of data at the DMC
>>  3) the 'output' parameter name is changed to 'format'
>> 
>> The FDSN StationXML schema (http://www.fdsn.org/xml/station/) is generally equivalent to the XML format previously used but it is a distinctly different schema that cannot be parsed with the same software parsing the XML from ws-station.
>> 
>> fdsnws-event is equivalent to ws-event with these differences:
>>  1) the FDSN service returns event depths in meters to conform to QuakeML 1.2 (the ws-event service used kilometers)
>>  2) the 'output' parameter name is changed to 'format'
>>  3) only a single catalog can be selected per-request, the default catalog is 'NEIC PDE'
>>  4) in addition to the default order of descending results, the 'orderby' parameter can be 'time-asc' or 'magnitude-asc' to set the order to ascending.
>> 
>> IRIS Web Services team
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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