seismic-py: Reading seismic data with Python

The field of seismic exploration of the Earth has changeddramatically over the last half a century. The Society of ExplorationGeophysicists (SEG) has worked to create standards to store the vastamounts of seismic data in a way that will be portable across computerarchitectures. However, it has been impossible to predict the needs of theimmense range of seismic data acquisition systems. As a result, vendors havehad to bend the rules to accommodate the needs of new instruments andexperiment types. For low level access to seismic data, there is need for astandard open source library to allow access to a wide range of vendor datafiles that can handle all of the variations. A new seismic software package,seismic-py, provides an infrastructure for creating and managing drivers foreach particular format. Drivers can be derived from one of the known formatsand altered to handle any slight variations. Alternatively drivers can bedeveloped from scratch for formats that are very different from any previouslydefined format. Python has been the key to making driver development easyand efficient to implement. The goal of seismic-py is to be the base systemthat will power a wide range of experimentation with seismic data and at thesame time provide clear documentation for the historical record of seismicdata formats