WaterML2.0: development of an open standard for hydrological time-series data exchange

Abstract

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,

Integrated Groundwater Data Management

“…26.1 above to this abstract model. For these systems, the data output toolsets are increasingly being used to deliver data outside the enterprise using web services and open standards such as WaterML2.0 (Taylor et al 2013).…”

“…Solutions to data interoperability typically require alignment of the data at five levels: systems, syntax, structure, semantics and pragmatics (Brodaric 2007). Ideally, SDI standards are used at each level, and in the water domain these are being developed in coordination with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and professional bodies such as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and Measurements (O&M), WaterML2 (WML2), and GroundwaterML (GWML), which are built with GML and constitute a common structure for observations, water time series, and groundwater features, respectively (Boisvert and Brodaric 2012;Cox 2011;Taylor et al 2013). Standard schemas are typically diagrammed using well-constrained methods, such as UML, and can be expressed in a variety of formats, such as XML.…”

“…Ideally, work on data ingestion would have involved adhering to standards such as WaterML2 (Taylor et al 2013) for observations, and GML (Portele 2007) for spatial data such as contributing catchments and river network topology. Instead, substantially greater work has been diverted to the collection, checking, re-purposing, re-formatting and management of input data, with all the complications of storage, deployment, duplication, broken provenance chains and a greater number of potential points where errors could be introduced.…”

Joining the Dots: Using Linked Data to Navigate between Features and Observational Data

“…WaterML2.0 part 1 [21] and the proposed part 2 [22] provide standard information models for representing hydrological observational data. Using WaterML2.0 with HY_Features is conceptually consistent, but use cases have not been widely tested or implemented.…”

Cyberinfrastructure to Support Flood Modeling from Catchment to Regional Scales

“…Geospatial data, in particular, has benefited from widely used metadata frameworks that allow scientists and engineers to more easily reuse data collected by others (e.g., ISO, 2003ISO, , 2011. More recently, hydrologic time series data have also benefited from the adoption of commonly used metadata frameworks (e.g., Taylor et al, 2014).…”