Schema issues

[kaestli]

In general, the SERA schema is a subset of quakeml 2.0 /SiteCharacterization (https://quake.ethz.ch/quakeml/QuakeML2.0/SiteCharacterization). However, there are some omissions hampering its functionality. E.g. the siteDescription entity lacks an identifier (siteDescriptionID), and the "Analysis" lacks the "SiteDescriptionReference" pointing to the siteDescription of the site it actually refers to.

[kaestli]

VelocityProfile should be a child element of Analysis (as in QuakeML / SiteCharacterization) (alternatively, refer to its publicID, however there is no incentive in this solution), otherwise it is remains unclear where analysis (and thus, which site) the profile belongs to.

[kiriaki]

Hi, Phillip.

I just uploaded a new schema version 1.3 that addresses the above issues. The schema is completely refactored to use complex / simple types, but the resulting xml structure remains almost the same.

The most important changes are:

1. siteDescription now has a resource ID
2. Analysis points to the siteDescription it refers to.
3. velocityProfile is a child of Analysis.
4. siteDescription has a preferredSiteAnalysisID pointer
5. siteDescription has a preferredVelocityProfile pointer
6. siteCharacterization may have more than one analysis

Other changes include:

1. Definition of enum types for all elements with fixed values (e.g. topography, morphology etc)
2. Addition of some extra elements like schema_version, creation_time, externalReference, creation_info etc.

Detailed information on the changes can be found on this document https://github.com/kiriaki/siteXML/blob/main/SiteXML_update_2025-09-23.docx

Questions:

• Is siteCharacterization element necessary since it only (currently) holds the analysis elements?
• What is the minimum information a network provider should distribute with SiteXML? e.g. siteDescription without Analysis?
• Should resource IDs be mandatory? In that case, should we produce unique resource IDs in case a network provider doesn't give these values (like in StationXML for example)?