NCEDC News/Blog

New NCEDC Web Services and Web Service Home

Categories:   Data Access Methods  |  Northern California Earthquake Data Center (NCEDC)  |  Web Services  |  International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks  |  Data Distribution

July 19, 2013 

July 19th, 2013

The NCEDC is pleased to announce a new home for the NCEDC web services and a new set of FDSN-compliant web services to access data at the NCEDC. Web services provide simple functions that can be used from a web browser, command-line programs such as curl and wget, dedicated clients, and through programming languages such as perl, python, shell scripts, or MATLAB.

New NCEDC Web Service Home:
In order to provide better service, all NCEDC web services can now be found at the new site
http://service.ncedc.org/

FDSN web services:
The NCEDC is introducing new FDSN-compliant web services. The FDSN web services provide a common specificiation to access common FDSN data types such as event information, station and information, and waveform data. The FDSN web services specification serves as a baseline level of compatibility, allowing data request tools to work with any FDSN data center that implementing these services.

The NCEDC has implemented the following FDSN web services:

fdsnws-dataselect
The fdsnws-dataselect web service returns multiple channels of FDSN miniSEED data for specified time ranges specified time ranges. With this service you specify a list of selections composed of network, station, location, channel, start-time and end-time and the service streams back the selected raw waveform data. fdsnws-dataslect can handle large selections and can be easily driven by command line programs such as wget, curl or dedicated client programs.

fdsnws-event
The fdsnws-event web service returns event information for a specified time and regions. Event info can include basic event information such as time, hypocenter, and magnitude, or more complete information that includes phase data. NCEDC-specific enhancements can also provide mechanism and moment tensor information. fdsnws-event can handle large selections and can be easily driven by command line programs such as wget, curl or dedicated client programs.

fdsnws-station
The fdsnws-station web service returns station and channel information for requested stations and channels The data is returned in FDSN StationXML format. fdsnws-station can handle large selections and can be easily driven by command line programs such as wget, curl or dedicated client programs.

Why web services?
Web services at the NCEDC use a RESTful (Representational State Transfer) design to provide a simple stateless query and data retrieval system. RESTful Web services use the HTTP protocol and normally communicate with clients using TCP port 80, which is the default port used by web servers. Using HTTP and standard web server ports minimizes interference from firewalls, and allows you to use web services anywhere you can use a web browser -- from behind most firewalls, and through web proxies.

The NCEDC FDSN web services are designed to be compatible with the FDSN web services implemented at other FDSN data centers such as the IRIS DMC Web Services. named web services at the IRIS DMC. Please visit the NCEDC Web Services Web Page for a complete list of NCEDC Web services and descriptions.

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