Program modules can use other plugins needed for work or to extend their capabilities. To do this, they search the list of plugins and include them. The lack of additional plugins may prevent the plugin module from working or limit its capabilities. There are two ways to search for additional plug-ins: By name or by type. Examples of searching by name are modules that include plugins that perform specific actions, for example, a plugin with a module for differentiation. In some cases, they need to load plugins whose names are not known priori, but they perform specific functions, e.g. decode a seismic format or perform optimization by a specific method, or a list of all plugins that perform this function is needed. Therefore for this purpose, plug types have been introduced. Each plugin can be a basic or a specialized type. Most plugins that extend the SWIP5 program are of the basic type. These include plug-ins implementing modules for calculating shock and seismic wave parameters, other computational modules, such as FFT, as well as modules with the exceptional operation, such as an interface to the Matlab program.
Specialized plugins have additional capabilities that allow you to use any plugin of a given type. Plugins of a type other than basic are used by other modules. For example, the module for reading waveforms from files uses all plugins specialized for reading specific waveform formats, and modules for locating earthquakes can use any of the available optimization methods. Another case of specialization is a database plugin that allows SWIP5 to automate the reading and writing of earthquake parameters regarding the available databases. There are currently 5 specialized types of plugins:
- The seismic formats plugin for reading waveforms in various formats is mainly intended for extending the capabilities of the module for reading seismograms from a file with new seismic data formats. An example is the reading MiniSEED plugin, which is used in e.g. a module for reading seismic files, or a module for downloading data from ArcLink or FDSNWS servers;
- The waveform processing plugin converts a seismic signal to another signal. Contrary to the filtration module (below), there are no restrictions on the signal, e.g. there may be processing that changes the sampling, non-linear processing, and processing for which the frequency response cannot be defined. Such a plug is used, for example, in a module for energy counting or events detection;
- The filter plugin is a special case of waveform processing. Filtering is a linear transformation. The characteristics of the filtration are been adding to the description of the seismic track. This type also includes plugins for differentiating and integrating signals used in many modules;
- The optimization plugin estimates the minimum of a function. Such plugins are, among others, used in some modules for locating or determining seismic source parameters;
- The database plugin saves and reads the elaboration to the database. This module can be connected to the function of automatically searching and reading the study from the database after loading the waveforms, or to automatically save the results to the database before moving to a new study or exiting the program.
Some specialized plugins do not provide any of their own functionalities, others are full modules that provide their own functionalities and create the program's menu, similar to basic-type plugins.