Introduction

Seismic source is the source that can cause ground motion recorded by seismic stations. Earthquake is one of the most common seismic sources.

The three most fundamental source parameters of an earthquake is its origin time (when it occurs), location or hypocenter (longitude, latitude and depth), and magnitude (how big it is).

Event Metadata Formats

There are many metadata formats to record source paramters.

• text: plain text

• csv: “comma separated values” ASCII text

• quakeml: a flexible, extensible and modular XML representation of seismological data

• geojson: a format for encoding a variety of geographic data structures uses the JSON standard

• kml: Google’s Keyhole Markup Language

• xml: Extensible Markup Language