Historical development

The GISMO Toolbox is a collection of MATLAB functions for seismic data that are built on a common foundation, originally developed at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute (UAFGI). GISMO originally stood for Geophysical Institute Seismology Matlab Objects, but now stands for Geophysical Investigations in Seismology using MATLAB Objects. The core of the GISMO Toolbox is "The Waveform Suite" which consists of the MATLAB classes - @waveform, @datasource, @scnlobject, @filterobject, and @spectralobject. These core contributions were largely authored by C. Reyes beginning in 2004 and further information about their historical development is posted here.

Waveform objects quickly proved to be a strong base for the development of more specific tools such as the @correlation toolbox developed by Mike West beginning is 2006. By 2007, most all Matlab savvy seismologists in our UAFGI group were using these codes in their seismic analyses. For the first time, we found ourselves working in a common environment with a common tool set. This led to the development of a proper code repository and the concept of "contributed" codes.

GISMO is an assemblage which bundles @waveform and @correlation and more recent classes such as Catalog, EventRate and Helicorder together with a variety of downstream codes. Initially GISMO development was driven primarily by the needs of the UAFGI Seismology Lab, the Alaska Earthquake Center, the Alaska Volcano Observatory and collaborators, but now it is driven by the user community with support from Mathworks. We make great efforts to ensure that the core codebase remains stable. However the GISMO Toolbox is designed as a "bleeding edge" project. We do not issue official stable releases of GISMO.

We believe strongly in the code, and in the shared development afforded by GISMO. We encourage wide use of the code and feedback is always welcomed. If you find yourself writing general codes that would be of interest to other users, we encourage you to read the page Contributing to GISMO and Contact the GISMO managers.

-- Mike West 2007 (updated by G. Thompson 2015)