We would like to contribute to the development of reliable and accountable standards and recommendations for seismic assessment of historical structures by making the data publicly available.
What is the project about?
Rubble stone masonry buildings are among the most vulnerable structures to earthquakes. Experimental tests were conducted on six large-scale rubble stone masonry walls at EESD to characterize their cyclic behavior, which can be used in seismic assessment methods through images and tabular data. To visualize and communicate our data with other researchers/industry professionals, we used the Python programming language. All codes and experimental data are publicly available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Why Open?
We would like to contribute to the development of reliable and accountable standards/recommendations for seismic assessment of historical structures by making the data publicly available, as the experimental test outputs are the most important source in the development of such guidelines. The shared data significantly contribute to the existing database of tests on stone masonry walls, as the number of tested rubble stone specimens was quite limited prior to this campaign.
Who benefits from it?
Our data is primarily useful to two groups of people. The first group consists of structural engineering researchers who will be able to use this data to validate their theoretical and numerical simulations as well as in research to develop mechanical and empirical models. Industry professionals and civil engineers will be able to use it in their seismic assessment pipeline for stone masonry buildings.
How did you make it Open?
The EESD’s head and researchers will update this dataset to include derived research works such as the development of local and global criteria describing different limit states and automated computation of crack kinematics from the digital image correlation measurements.
Although it may appear otherwise, publicly sharing codes, data, and software is quite costly. Researchers must devote a significant amount of time to organizing and documenting the code and data. But it does not stop there. Open-source materials necessitate upkeep. The question is who is responsible for maintenance, the researchers or some third party. Who is going to pay them for the maintenance? However, I am hesitant to trust and pay a third party to maintain software/code/data, and I believe that open-source initiatives should not be mixed with third parties who use open science as a cover for their business model.
Contact: Amir Rezaie