USING “EARTH-SHIELD” AS INTERDISCIPLINARY LEARNING PLATFORM FOR MACRO-SEISMIC AUTOMATIC CALCULATIONS

The application helps the researchers to select more information for an earthquake and it is used as a knowledge base for the primary and secondary educational institutions. It automates the import of earthquakes for evaluation, the checking of the earthquake age for selection and data processing, regardless the language. It also gives options for visualizing the answers and /or making further use of them. All this information is automatically configured to questionnaires sent in Primary and Secondary schools throughout the country and they are completed electronically by the students. The system receives and evaluates this information in real time contributing actively to the Athens Observatory scientists’ research.
It combines various open source technologies such as XML, Google Maps, MySQL and the base for the whole project is Php language.
Until present time in Greece, the macro seismic observations collection was accomplished with the following procedure: after the occurrence of an earthquake, the Institute of Geodynamics was asking from public institutions such as schools and city halls to fill up a printed questionnaire and send it back. After collecting the printed questionnaires, the researchers had to manually import all the answers to an offline database for storage and further research. In addition, during the last few months an online version has also been available to the general public.
This method though has had some flaws. At first the answers were very limited without letting much space for deeper research of the observations. Moreover, the language of these questionnaires was only available in Greek, thus limiting once again the target group of the participants. Also, the data entry had a significant overhead in time that could be used for more productive tasks.
To encounter the aforementioned challenges and improve the answer gathering within the scope of the ASPIDA project, we undertook the creation of the macro-seismic observations web page from the beginning. The task has been implemented in two phases:
• The first phase included the creation of a multilingual page of an existing questionnaire connected with the evaluation of seismic activity. Moreover, this questionnaire is automatically sent to all primary schools in the country and it is completed by students. The system receives and evaluates this real-time information actively contributing to the investigation
• The second phase included the implementation (programming) of an application of automatically updating the list of earthquakes that are available for evaluation.

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