The Arquive of Tatuoca Magnetic Observatory Brazil: from paper to intelligent bytes

Abstract

The Magnetic Observatory of Tatuoca (TTB) was installed by Observatório Nacional (ON) in 1957, near Belém city in the state of Pará, Brazilian Amazon. Its history goes back to 1933, when a Danish mission used this location to collect data, due to its privileged position near the terrestrial equator. Between 1957 and 2007, TTB produced 18,000 magnetograms on paper using photographic variometers, and other associated documents like absolute value forms and yearbooks. Data was obtained manually from these graphs with rulers and grids, taking 24 average readings per day, that is, one per hour. In 2017, the Federal University of Pará (UFPA in the Portuguese acronym) and ON collaborated to rescue this physical archive. In 2022 UFPA took a step forward and proposed not only digitizing the documents but also developing an intelligent agent capable of reading and extracting the information of the curves with a resolution better than an hour, being this the central goal of the project. If the project succeeds, it will rescue 50 years of data imprisoned in paper, increasing measurement sensitivity far beyond what these sources used to give. This will also open the possibility of applying the same AI to similar documents in other observatories or disciplines like seismography. This article recaps the project, and the complex challenges faced in articulating Archival Science principles with AI and Geoscience.

Description

Keywords

Geomagnetism, geophysics computing, information retrieval systems, records management, Deep learning, Observatories, Collaboration, Big Data, Data mining

Citation

Cristian Berrío-Zapata; Ester Ferreira da Silva; Mayara Costa Pinheiro; Vinicius Augusto Carvalho de Abreu; Cristiano Mendel Martins; Mario Augusto Góngora; Kelso Dunman (2023) The Arquive of Tatuoca Magnetic Observatory Brazil: from paper to intelligent bytes. 2022 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), Osaka, Japan, 2022, pp. 2482-2489

Rights

Research Institute