The problem of archiving, accessing and performing analyses on data or information is very important in any field where lots of information are available, and especially when this information is not homogeneous. Our field of interest are volcanoes, with all their acquired (multidisciplinary) data and/or information. A user-friendly system is therefore necessary in order not to waste time searching where the data are, how to extract information and even how to load the raw data to perform analyses. In order to solve these problems, and to allow for additional features, a flexible and user-friendly database has been developed in the framework of the MULTIMO (Multi-disciplinary monitoring, modelling and forecasting of volcanic hazard) European project.
Our system consists of a collection of Open Source software such us Linux (operating system), Zope (web application server), MySql (relational database), Scilab (math engine) and any kind of programming language such as Python, C, Fortran etc. The choice of a relational database is due to its intrinsic modularity, the memory-saving characteristics and the possibility of adding new fields, or even new tables, without repopulating the entire database. Moreover, and especially, this choice allows for a wide range of possible cross queries.
All the data then become accessible through a web interface with automatic generated pages. We can apply built-in or user-defined queries, get information, draw graphs and even perform analyses using the scilab math-engine. New algorithms and analysis techniques can be added to our system in order to use them through the math-engine and, of course, these algorithms can be written in any possible language. Researchers should be no more tied to a particular operating system or software when accessing data and information and applying analysis on them. All the low level problems should be left to the system and everything should be accessible with a simple user-friendly and platform-independent interface. The possible extraction and cross correlation of the data (and information) should be infact limited not by the software environment, but only by the fantasy of the researcher.
