[Marble-devel] Earthquake plugin.

[Torsten Rahn]

Hi,

On Mittwoch 20 Januar 2010 21:17:15 v_2e at ukr.net wrote:
>   Hello again!
>   I have already compiled the "TutorialPlugin" successfully and now I
> think I could begin working on the Earthquake plugin.

Great. 
Big Thanks btw go to Bastian Holst who has created this nice tutorial.

Vladimir: If you think that the TutorialPlugin wiki can get improved don't 
hesitate to make some suggestions or fix the wiki :-)

>   But the earthquake catalogues I know require filling a special
> request form on their webpage to retrieve a table of known earthquakes.
> Maybe you know where to get the information about earthquakes using,
> for example, some parameters added to the URL during a request?
>   Please, tell me if you know such place.

Well, the very first thing that should also be taken into account is licensing of 
the data and the Terms of Use for the API. 
Ideally these terms should be as free as possible (and have no "only for non-
commercial use" and no google-style "may only be used in a webbrowser" clause) .
So whatever source you are using please check the legal stuff first. We already 
had some incident where we had to basically abandon the Online plugin source 
code because of legal doubts. :-(

However with earthquakes I guess this shouldn't be much of an issue, since I 
know that such data is offered via US gov sites which usually offer their data 
under the FOIA "licensed" under the Public Domain. Still you need to verify 
this.

I just found this:

1.) http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/

There are two options on this site: 
* either parsing of XML (which would be suitable for the OnlinePlugin)
* or usage of the generated KML files. Marble has some capabilities to read kml. 
However the kml files there are pkziped kmls and Marble doesn't support this 
format.

2.) Geonames is also a pretty cool source for geographic data: They also offer 
earthquake webservices: See

http://www.geonames.org/export/ws-overview.html

The Geonames.org earthquake webservice is using JSON (which we also support in 
Marble -- IIRC in the photo plugin):

http://www.geonames.org/export/JSON-webservices.html#earthquakesJSON

Best Regards,

Torsten








>   Vladimir.
> 
> -----
>  <v_2e at ukr.net>
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