In the field of seismic engineering it is common to employ dynamic analysis techniques to predict, to a certain degree of accuracy, the behaviour of a structure in the event of an earthquake. The American and European regulations specify two different types of seismic response spectra that are used for the seismic design and/or assessment for simple structures.
When more complex structures are analysed, the regulations specify that more advanced analysis should be performed which consists of assessing the response of a given structure to the action of a given set of earthquake records. According to the regulations these records should be compatible with the seismic response spectrum representing the earthquake hazard of the area where the structure will be located.
SelEQ, an application developed for earthquake record selection, aims to help seismic engineers in finding adequate records for dynamic analysis. It allows the users to easily filter through thousands of real records, and order them by adequacy using a root-meansquare formula to compare them with the regulation-defined spectra.
SelEQ has been developed for the Web, using a 3-tier client-server architecture. It does not force the users to have any specific software installed (a simple Web browser is enough to access the application), and it is easily maintainable and extensible (since the business rules and database are kept server-side).
It is hoped that SelEQ will serve as a proof-of-concept for seismic engineers, displaying the capabilities of the Web for applications shared by several users.