Development of knowledge engineering makes it possible to bring an information space relating to an entire domain of knowledge into a strict form, which is both computer-tractable and convenient for collaborative research work. Nevertheless, there are issues that seriously hamper this process – e.g., definition of key terms, which is often not shared by the colleagueship, and interrelation of concepts developed by different schools within the colleagueship focused on different aspects of this domain. Another issue is the export of results to a wider community unfamiliar with the specificity of local studies. All these issues can be successfully addressed by the method of event bush brought into the COLLA environment. COLLA is an asynchronous web-based tool for support of collaborative research developed by Diviacco.

This study demonstrates how the abovementioned issues can be resolved by the example of one of the most important information domains in the field of seismology, the site effects. Text, graphics, tabular data and a physical model coming from different sources and different contexts are united in one context keeping all the specificity of original understanding and allowing the researchers keep on following their own context and terminology. Furthermore, some existing physical models of site effects are being “parsed” by the events and connectives of the event bush, and this allows comparison of different models as well as their optimization both for geophysical and external purposes.

This research is a joint effort of the Geognosis team with Paolo Diviacco, OGS, Trieste, Italy, Roberto Carniel, Universita degli Studi di Udine, Italy, and other colleagues.

The text of the paper published by the Earth Science Informatics can be found here, and full paper is available from the authors upon request.