ShakyGround has been created with the scope to provide a reliable, easy to use, and versatile tool for the estimation of seismic strong ground motion. It forms the seismological base for the earthquake resistant design of buildings and land use planning. The characteristics of ShakyGround allow to identify shaky sites in advance which is essential for emergency planning. ShakyGround incorporates concepts of the seismic source process and wave propagation effects which are well confirmed by numerous scientific studies and practical applications. In ShakyGround we approach the problem of seismic load estimation by means of synthetic simulation of acceleration seismograms.

The synthetic approach offers the possibility to account for the specific geological site conditions and characteristics of the seismotectonic zone. The user's experience in the context of ShakyGround is exploited for establishing the model parameters rather than for the search of a "suitable" experimental example seismogram. ShakyGround allows to vary the geotechnical and source parameters randomly disclosing the possibility to evaluate the stability of the results statistically. Finally ShakyGround produces a report of important simulated engineering seismological signal parameters together with response spectra which can be directly compared to standard seismic codes (for ex. EC8, US Building Code).

ShakyGround is a Software equipped whit an advanced GUI, builded for the Microsoft Windows operative systems (95, 98, NT, 2000, XP), and a database engine for the models and results storage. The user interface allows to enter the input parameters on "sheets". There are sheets related to the seismic source parameters, others concern the geotechnical parameters, the calculation of response spectra and some general information concerning the operation of ShakyGround and the output. This system protect the user from errors due to mispellings and the use of improper parameters. A special feature of ShakyGround is the access to a data base. This facilitates the use of ShakyGround in seismic zoning projects where a large number of sites and different seismic scenarios have to be considered. Earthquake parameters and typical sets of geotechnical parameters (called "stratigraphies") can be stored and accessed in "catalogs". The models derived- or not - from this catalogs can be saved with the simulations results. This database can be used by different users in a network and can be easily exported on the Internet/Intranet. It is possible to pass the afore mentioned sheets to the data base and to recombine them creating a new model and new sheets. This makes the setup of a model easy and fast, and avoids many errors occurring during the creation of suitable input parameters. ShakyGround gives numerical and graphical results: response spectra, the simulated seismograms, allows to user an immediate valutation.