Organization of a geophysical information space by using an event-bush-based collaborative tool.

Development of knowledge engineering makes it possible to bring an information space relating to an entire domain of knowledge within the field of geoscience into a strict form, which is both computer-tractable and convenient for collaborative research work. Nevertheless, there are issues that seriously hamper this process - the problem of defining 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 a novel technique of knowledge engineering, the event bush, brought into the COLLA environment for geoscientific collaborative studies. This paper demonstrates how the said 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.