MAEviz: an earthquake risk assessment system

MAEviz is a state-of-the-art earthquake risk assessment environment built to quickly bring new research results into production analyses. It is built upon an extensible Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) based GIS application platform and leverages distributed content management, workflow, and virtual-organization based design concepts. MAEviz has been developed as a collaboration between the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Mid-America Earthquake (MAE) Center community and it implements the MAE Consequence-based Risk Management (CRM) methodology. The open source MAEviz provide a modern GIS application interface with sophisticated visualization and reporting capabilities that also incorporates mechanisms to integrate distributed data sources, develop reusable analyses and view data provenance, coordinate work in distributed teams. As an Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) application, MAEviz is composed of multiple plugins and extensions that wrap various open source libraries such as Geotools, the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), and Jasper reports as well as middleware components developed at NCSA. This architecture enables MAEviz to rapidly be extended with new scientific analyses and allows reuse of the base GIS environment capabilities. This demonstration paper provides an overview of MAEviz' capabilities and architecture and presents it as an exemplar of a new generation of "cyberenvironments" that enable multi-disciplinary collaboration and foster direct connections between researchers, practitioners and decision makers. MAEviz is designed to bridge the gap between scientific discovery and practical use by integrating the latest research findings, most accurate data and state-of-the-art methodologies into an extensible open source software system.