Water trading in Australia is enabled by much historical institutional development, which had other objectives at the time that it was implemented. After 2 decades of institutional reform to enable water markets in the Murray Darling Basin, active markets are reallocating surface water entitlements among irrigation users. However, permanent water trading is currently limited in terms of the volume traded and reallocation among uses. Given these limitations, this paper seeks to assess the success of surface water markets in the Murray‐Darling Basin by comparing current practice against the six desirable characteristics for water markets suggested by Howe et al. (1986). Overall, it is argued that, despite the relatively low rate of reallocation, the market performs well against most criteria but that ongoing evolution of institutional arrangements is critical for improved success.

The increasing global demand on freshwater is resulting in nations improving their terrestrial water monitoring and reporting systems to better understand the availability, and quality, of this valuable resource. A barrier to this is the inability for stakeholders to share information relating to water observations data: traditional hydrological information systems have relied on internal custom data formats to exchange data, leading to issues in data integration and exchange. Organisations are looking to information standards to assist in data exchange, integration and interpretation to lower costs in use, and re-use, of monitoring data. The WaterML2.0 Standards Working Group (SWG), working within the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and in cooperation with the joint OGC-World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) Hydrology Domain Working Group (HDWG), has developed an open standard for the exchange of water observation data. The focus of the standard is time-series data, commonly used for hydrological applications such as flood forecasting, environmental reporting and hydrological infrastructure, where a lack of standards inhibits efficient re-use and automation. This paper describes the development methodology and principles of WaterML2.0, key parts of its information model, implementation scenarios, evaluation and future work. WaterML2.0 was adopted by the OGC as an official standard in September 2012. P. Taylor (corresponding author) CSIRO,

This paper presents a generic approach to integrate environmental sensor data efficiently, allowing the detection of relevant situations and events in near real-time through continuous querying. Data variety is addressed with the use of the Semantic Sensor Network ontology for observation data modelling, and semantic annotations for environmental phenomena. Data velocity is handled by distributing sensor data messaging and serving observations as RDF graphs on query demand. The stream processing engine presented in the paper, morph-streams++, provides adapters for different data formats and distributed processing of streams in a cluster. An evaluation of different configurations for parallelization and semantic annotation parameters proves that the described approach reduces the average latency of message processing in some cases.