Discover SHERPA, our Picture Collection Tool!

http://sherpa.emsc-csem.org


What is SHERPA?

After an earthquake, pictures of the event can be viewed quite easily on the web. But once the event gets old, pictures disappear and can no longer be viewed, a heavy loss for researchers looking for information.
SHERPA, Sharing of Earthquake Rupture Pictures Archive, a web application developed by Yann THEO, aims to fill this void. By making available pictures of past earthquakes and sharing resources, it will act as a reference database for scientists.

You can either upload your pictures or browse through the database.

Show what you’ve got!

Our application is targeted at scientists and scientists only.
By uploading your pictures on SHERPA, you will get an audience you could never have gotten before, except if you had the time and means to maintain a personal website (by uploading your picture on SHERPA, you will benefit from the visibility of the EMSC web site : half a million visits from 150 countries per month). We take care of the support for you, and your pictures - the result of your work and travels - will be on display on the web for your fellow colleagues to see.

Sharing your pictures will provide you with an international exposure and a potential wordlwide recognition. Scary? Don’t be afraid - while online, your pictures will be perfectly protected.

Remain in Control

To protect the authors copyright and avoid an unfair use of the photos, all pictures will be marked by a watermark “NOT FOR PUBLICATION” spread all over, and state the author’s name. Authors and authors only have the possibility to remove this mark should they want their work to enter the public domain.
If a user sees a picture he/she would like to use (as an illutration for an article for example), he/she can put this picture in his/her cart. After the validation of this cart, a request (stating the name and purposes of the requestor) will be sent to the author(s) to ask to share the picture(s). If an author accepts this request, the requestor will be given the authorization to access a protected folder and download the “unprotected” version of the picture(s) (original size, without watermark).
Authors may or may not accept this request, meaning that they will always have a complete control about who will use their picture and for what purposes. Without the author explicit consent, no picture will never be accessible to anyone.
We want to state this point very clearly because ownership and copyright protection are essential to the SHERPA project.

Browse A Woldwide Picture Library

Uploading pictures is quick and easy: once registered, you can very simply upload pictures that can then be geolocalised using a Google map plugged on the web site.
The software is able to read the pictures exif file (a file contained in the picture header) and retrieve location data to auto-localise pictures taken with a gps camera. SHERPA users can then link their pictures with a past earthquake and choose specifications/key words (TAGS) to associate with their pictures.

This way, their pictures are identified and searchable in the database.
Using these tags, you can alternatively search the database for pictures of a same phenomenon in several events.

Comparative data will then be accessible online.

The search engine is simple and easy to use: users can search pictures by date, tags, author or location. The pictures selected can be viewed on a map and on a carousel.


We hope you will find SHERPA easy to use
and enjoy the possibilities it offers to our scientific community.

http://sherpa.emsc-csem.org