William Davis, Cassandra R. Hunt

The increasing scale and diversity of seismic data, and the growing role of big data in seismology, has raised interest in methods to make data exploration more accessible. This paper presents the use of knowledge graphs (KGs) for representing seismic data and metadata to improve data exploration and analysis, focusing on usability, flexibility, and extensibility. Using constraints derived from domain knowledge in seismology, we define a semantic model of seismic station and event information used to construct the KGs. Our approach utilizes the capability of KGs to integrate data across many sources and diverse schema formats. We use schema-diverse, real-world seismic data to construct KGs with millions of nodes, and illustrate potential applications with three big-data examples. Our findings demonstrate the potential of KGs to enhance the efficiency and efficacy of seismological workflows in research and beyond, indicating a promising interdisciplinary future for this technology.