Cloud Migration: Famous Cities

[mhearne-usgs]

Periodically, we have an event occur near a well known city, where that city does not appear on the cities list. Here I describe one possible solution to this.

Assumptions:

1. a future PAGER system implemented in AWS, with an API gateway to allow a CLI to connect to it
2. The cities table is stored in a relational database instead of a file.
3. The cities table is periodically updated from geonames
4. Tables look like this:

city

id integer primary key
geonameid integer geonames id
asciiname
...

famous_city

id integer primary key
city_id integer foreign key (city.id)

1. Start with a list of cities like this one:
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_international_visitors
2. Match the cities on that list with cities in the database, and add the ids of those cities into the famous_city table.
3. Provide a command line tool that allows users to add "famous" cities to the map:
   adminpager cities EVENTID --add acapulco
4. This command sends a request through the API gateway to the back end, which returns a list of cities inside that map that match the input string. The user chooses the desired city(ies) from this list. This subset is then sent back through the gateway to a process that adds those cities to the "famous" list. This process avoids the "South San Francisco" problem.

Operationally, any city on the "famous" list which falls inside the ShakeMap boundaries will be guaranteed to appear on the selected cities list (unless there are more than 11 famous cities inside the map, in which case some sorting will occur)