GNGTS 2024 - Atti del 42° Convegno Nazionale

Session 2.1 GNGTS 2024 The database of the Catalogue of Strong Earthquakes in Italy and in the Mediterranean Area (CFTI): exploring historical seismology through modern web tools G. Tarabusi 1 , C. Ciuccarelli 1 , M.G. Bianchi 1 , C. Zei 1,2 , D. Mariotti 1 , G. Sgattoni 1 , R.C. Taccone 1 , G. De Francesco 1 , G. Ferrari 1 , G. Valensise 1 , CFTI working group 1 Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Italy 2 Dept. of Physics and Earth Sciences, Ferrara University, Italy CFTI, the Catalogue of Strong Earthquakes in Italy and in the Mediterranean Area, is an analytical inventory that stores in a large database the results of four decades of research in Historical Seismology on Italy and on the Mediterranean area. CFTI is both parametric and analytical, as for most of the analysed earthquakes it features descriptive summaries of both the effects of each specific event at each individual location, and of its overall social and economic impact. But it is also a fully transparent database, as for each investigated earthquake sequence it provides a complete bibliography of all available testimonies of scholars and casual observers: many of such testimonies are supplied on-line, either in the form of the original source or as a transcription. Since the beginning of the research in 1983, the Working Group developed a specific computerised cataloguing scheme of all historical materials identified along selected research paths. The work was extremely extensive from its very beginning; numerous previously unknown or poorly known earthquakes were added to the previously available wealth of knowledge. The method used for unearthing and organising the new information and the resulting elaborations has been gradually refined and consolidated in the subsequent versions of the CFTI. The current version of the catalogue, termed CFTI5Med (Guidoboni et al., 2018; Guidoboni et al., 2019), includes 1,167 earthquakes for the Italian area and 473 earthquakes for the extended Mediterranean region (the latter section deals exclusively with ancient and medieval events). It hence draws from an extremely valuable and unique documentary and historical heritage: one of the most important in the world, in terms of quantity, quality and geographic distribution of the available information, and also in terms of the relevant chronological interval, spanning over two millennia (from the 8th century B.C. to the 15th century for Mediterranean area; from the 5th century B.C. to the 20th century for Italy). Since the release of CFTI5Med, which features an entirely renovated and advanced web interface, we added various datasets and developed new IT tools, all accessible via the CFTILab web portal (Tarabusi et al., 2020), which are the result of synergistic collaboration among the various skills that exist in the CFTI Working Group. Our aim was to enable multiple specialist and non-specialist users – including scholars, civil protection officers, teachers, students, professionals, and simply curious citizens – to explore and analyse efficiently the extensive wealth of data stored in the Catalogue. We briefly present here four of its main components (tools and datasets).