The ShakeCast Inventory Worbook is a collection of Excel spreadsheets used to bridge the gap between users’ data and the ShakeCast application. It allows users to collect their facility, notification group, and user information in a single location. Once the data has been collected, a master XML file can be exported that contains all the information and can easily be uploaded to ShakeCast. Data is validated as it’s entered into the workbook and malformed data is not exported. This ensures that user data will fulfill the basic requirements for ShakeCast to run correctly.
This workbook also serves as a stepping-stone between ShakeCast versions. This workbook will remain compatible with future versions of ShakeCast to ensure installations of new software will be hassle free.
Facilities
The primary function of ShakeCast is to generate a list of facilities affected by earthquake shaking. These facilities are technically anything you want to monitor, for instance: an office building, a university campus made up of multiple buildings, a bridge, or even specific parts of a bridge can all be defined as facilities within ShakeCast.
Notification Groups
ShakeCast needs to know which people within your organization should get notifications in specific situations. For instance, first responders may need to be notified in the case of a large earthquake, while only ShakeCast administrators are interested in receiving notifications for small quakes. Notification groups can be defined so that notifications are only generated when specific shaking or potential impact requirements are met. Users can then be linked to these notification groups in order to receive the notifications when they’re generated.
Users
A user is anyone within your organization who will be receiving notifications from your ShakeCast instance or accessing its web interface.