Seismic data Network Access Point (SNAP)

Whenever the critical mass is exceeded in collecting vast amounts of data, the need for specific tools to analyse them, always arises. Moreover, if collaborative analysis is planned among several groups of scientists, IT network based dissemination strategies have to be considered. Commercial systems are available, but mainly provide tools for work carried out in the enclosed environment of a large private company, and are, of course, very expensive. What about the rest of the world? Universities, public research centres, and smaller firms cannot afford to purchase these systems. Moreover the needs of such institutions are generally different from those of a private company. This implies customisation that is not possible from a commercial point of view. On the other hand, developing a complete solution from scratch would mean spending a huge amount of time and effort devoted to a long-term project without any guarantee of success. An easier solution would be to use existing tools that, even if not specifically developed for these applications, can be combined "with" creativity. A very important issue to consider in this perspective is the phenomenon of the Open Software community, which has released an impressive amount of software tools from scientific to business applications and from operating systems to graphics processing packages. Besides being free, although certain restrictions do apply after General Public License [4], it is very important to underline that the software developed in this framework is highly flexible and reliable, being tested by a huge community of users (or used by a huge community of testers). Over the last several years we, at the Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale (OGS), have been facing the problem of improving the accessibility of our ever-increasing archive of geophysical data for both the "in-house" scientists and our network of collaborations with other researchers and institutions. Typically, subsets of available seismic data surveys need to be located within a geographical area which bounds an interesting seismic feature. In this situation, a tool is required that can be used from anywhere to efficiently search, format and visualise seismic lines based on their geographic location. The selected datasets can then be exported to the client workstation where they can be analysed, reprocessed, and eventually, if necessary, be uploaded back into the database itself. Having considered the requirements, resources and costs we decided to develop SNAP (Seismic database Network Access Point) [7],a web based dynamic tool for searching and analyzing geophysical data, based exclusively on Open Source software.