Online Documentation for the OpenQuake Model Building Toolkit (MBTK)

The GEM Hazard Team has always prioritized building tools to make hazard model development more rapid, more reproducible, and just plain easier. This has greatly increased our productivity and the quality of our work.

However, during the big push to create the GEM Hazard Mosaic, these tools were changing rapidly as our workflows evolved, and documentation of them lagged. Now that things are stabilizing a little bit, we are making an effort to make these tools more widely useful.

The primary set of tools that we use is called the OpenQuake Model Building Toolkit (MBTK). The MBTK is a collection of Python modules, scripts and Jupyter notebooks that contains a huge amount of functionality for building and analyzing different components of a hazard model, and writing these components in the format used by the OpenQuake Engine.

Though the MBTK has not received much public promotion, it has been developed publicly on Github here, consistent with GEM's commitment to free and open-source software.

We have also recently started building and releasing documentation for the MBTK. The documentation can be found here. We are starting to write tutorials for some aspects as well. Those will be posted as they develop.