Web 2.0 and Earthquake Science

Fox, G (1) and Pierce, M (1)

(1) Community Grids Lab, Indiana University, Bloomington, US.
Phone: 812-856-1212 ; Email: mpierce@cs.indiana.edu

We discuss the impact of Web 2.0 on geo-sciences and on e-Science generally. Social networks, user driven content, "start page" portals, gadgets/widgets, mash-ups, REST-style web services, RSS/Atom feeds, JSON, and AJAX have transformed Web computing and have challenged our assumptions about how Web applications should be designed and built. Moreover, Web 2.0 and cloud computing provide a comprehensive network programming environment that matches well against the nominally organized Web Services architectures. Inevitably, these new techniques will also having an impact on e-Science, both in the way data are delivered and shared and the way that scientists interact with each other. Web 2.0 development and collaboration models are particularly important in international organizations such as ACES. We review the situation generally and discuss possible application scenarios involving earthquake science and polar science.