These activities are carried out in close collaboration with the INGV as part of its agreements with the Italian Department of Civil Protection (DPC) and with the ETHZ within the ambit of EU H2020 project RISE. They concern both the improvement and standardization of databases of seismicity at the Italian and European scale through the development of innovative methods and procedures. In particular, there have been developed an algorithm (BOXER) for the location of historical earthquakes based on the descriptions of macroseismic effects, a procedure for verification and cataloguing of more than 10,000 earthquake focal mechanisms of the Euro-Mediterranean area (EMMA) and a methodology for the homogenization of the various definitions of earthquake magnitude. Homogeneous earthquake catalogues for Italy, the Mediterranean and the entire globe were produced, including the reference catalogue (CPTI15) used by the most recent seismic hazard assessment for regulatory purposes in Italy. In this context it is also relevant the statistical study of the time decay of seismic sequences and the exploration of possible statistical precursors of earthquakes, like the occurrence of strong foreshocks and the time variations of the slope (b-value) of the frequency-magnitude relationship.