EarthquakesOnline tools accelerate progress in earthquake engineering, science

Published 1 August 2013

A new study has found that on-line tools, access to experimental data, and other services provided through “cyberinfrastructure” are helping to accelerate progress in earthquake engineering and science. The cyberinfrastructure includes a centrally maintained, Web-based science gateway called NEEShub, which houses experimental results and makes them available for reuse by researchers, practitioners, and educational communities. NEEShub contains more than 1.6 million project files stored in more than 398,000 project directories and has been shown to have at least 65,000 users over the past year.

A new study has found that on-line tools, access to experimental data, and other services provided through “cyberinfrastructure” are helping to accelerate progress in earthquake engineering and science.

The research is affiliated with the National Science Foundation’s George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), based at Purdue University. NEES includes fourteen laboratories for earthquake engineering and tsunami research, tied together with cyberinfrastructure to provide information technology for the network.

A Purdue University release reports that the cyberinfrastructure includes a centrally maintained, Web-based science gateway called NEEShub, which houses experimental results and makes them available for reuse by researchers, practitioners, and educational communities.

It’s a one-stop shopping site for the earthquake-engineering community to access really valuable intellectual contributions as well as experimental data generated from projects at the NEES sites,” said Thomas Hacker, an associate professor in the Department of Computer and Information Technology at Purdue and co-leader of information technology for NEES. “The NEES cyberinfrastructure provides critical information technology services in support of earthquake engineering research and helps to accelerate science and engineering progress in a substantial way.”

Findings from a recent study about cyberinfrastructure’s impact on the field were detailed in a paper published in a special issue of the Journal of Structural Engineering, which coincides with a NEES Quake Summit 2013, to be held 7-8 August in Reno, Nevada. The paper was authored by Hacker; Rudolf Eigenmann, a professor in Purdue’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Ellen Rathje, a professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin.

A major element of the NEES cyberinfrastructure is a “project warehouse” that provides a place for researchers to upload project data, documents, papers and dissertations containing important experimental knowledge for the NEES community to access.

A key factor in our efforts is the very strong involvement of experts in earthquake engineering and civil engineering in every aspect of our IT,” Hacker said. “The software we develop and services we provide are driven by user requirements prioritized by the community.

This is an example of a large-scale cyberinfrastructure project that is really working to address big-data needs and developing technologies and solutions that work today. It’s a good example of how cyberinfrastructure can help knit together distributed communities or researchers into something greater than the sum of its parts.”

The effort requires two key aspects: technological elements and sociological elements.

The technological elements