1. OGC/WMO Hydrology Domain Working Group: mission, activities, plans
Ilya Zaslavsky
Spatial Information Systems Lab
San Diego Supercomputer Center
UCSD
ESIP Summer Meeting – ESIP Water Data Group, July 21, 2010

2. What is the OGC?
The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) is a non-profit, international voluntary consensus standards organization that is leading the development of standards for geospatial and location based services.
The OGC facilitates a consensus process in which government, private industry, NGOs, and academia collaborate to create open and extensible software application programming interfaces for geospatial and other mainstream information technologies
The OGC is a not for profit consortium dedicated to the development of specifications that enable geospatial technologies to “plug and play” across any device, platform or network. The OGC consists of 380+ members - geospatial technology software vendors, systems integrators, government agencies and universities - participating in a consensus process to develop, test, and document publicly available interface specifications and encodings for the geospatial industry. Open interfaces and protocols defined by OpenGIS® Specifications are designed to support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT, and to empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful to all kinds of applications.

3. Benefits of open standards
Prevents a single group from controlling a standard
Facilitates competition
Stimulates innovation
Customers benefit from not being locked into a particular supplier.
Source: Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness, April Committee For Economic Development.
Prevents a single, self-interested party from controlling a standard
Facilitates competition by lowering the cost of entry
Stimulates innovation beyond the standard by companies that seek to differentiate themselves.
Customers value the interoperability that open standards provide and generally benefit from not being locked into a particular supplier.
Integral part of CI;
Requirement for CI sustainability and extensibility, esp. with 3rd party components
AND - CI efforts are also a way to inform standards development

4. WMO
‘... the UN system's authoritative voice on the state and behaviour of the Earth's atmosphere, its interaction with the oceans, the climate it produces and the resulting distribution of water resources’
‘... facilitates the free and unrestricted exchange of data and information, products and services in real- or near-real time ...’

5. Hydrology Domain Working Group
A joint working group of the OGC and WMO constituted as an OGC Domain Working Group.
Brings together interested parties to develop and promote the technology for greatly improving the way in which water information is described and shared.
Co-chaired by representatives nominated by the OGC TC and the World Meteorological Organisation’s (WMO) Commission for Hydrology (CHy).
Current Co-Chairs: David Lemon (CSIRO), Ulrich Looser (GRDC) and Ilya Zaslavsky (SDSC)
> 50 Participants, > 30 Organisations
Public mailing list
Twiki

6. Expected Outcomes
An agreed feature model (ie. what are the features of the hydrosphere (from an information perspective) and how are they related.)
An agreed observation model.
Agreed vocabularies, endorsed by the community, and by WMO in particular. Agreeing on semantics is a long process, but we should be able to recommend some vocabularies
Also: services carrying the above

7. Activities
Analysis and harmonization of existing commonly used protocols and standards in the domain
Interoperability Experiments (IEs) focused on selected sub-domains of water data (e.g. surface water, groundwater, water quality, water use, hydrologic forecasts, real time data)
Participation in GEO Architecture Implementation Pilots (AIPs), focused on broader scenarios within the entire domain and across domains
Submission of discussion papers and best practice papers (the latter following IE and AIP experiences)
Collaboration with other DWGs, in particular ESS (on modeling), MetOcean (on handling gridded data), SWE (on real time data management)
© 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

8. Iterative Development
Hydro-DWG workplan priority
Feedback to standards and services
Development
Focus
Plan Do
Demonstrate
Improve
Observation Model
Conclude IE
Demonstration
Feature Model
Develop IE
Vocabularies
Services stack
Complete IE
Thanks to Peter Fitch for this slide

9. HDWG Agenda, Silver Spring Meeting, June 14-18
1. Introduction, results of Ispra (co-chairs), IEs and WaterML
8-8:20: David Lemon, HydroDWG planning and next steps
8:20-9:40: WaterML 2 and Harmonization Report updates (Pete Taylor and the WaterML 2 design group)
9:40-9:50 Groundwater IE update (Nate Booth); Surface Water IE announcement and kick-off invitation (Peter Fitch)
2. Presentations
10-10:25: Mark Nardi (USGS) - Water use data management at USGS: information model, implementations, prospects of water use science.
10:24-10:45: Roland Viger and Nate Booth (USGS) - Using existing and emerging OGC standards to support hydrologic models.
10:45-11:05: Ben Domenico (UNIDATA) - Managing point time series in netCDF/DAP
11:05-11:30: John Halquist (NOAA), Peter Gijsbers (Deltares) - Operational hydrologic forecasts and infrastructure operation: use cases and requirements; -- Pedro Restrepo (NOAA) - Interagency Water Resources Science and Services Initiative
11:30-11:45: Michael Piasecki (Drexel University), Ilya Zaslavsky (SDSC) - CUAHSI Hydrologic parameter ontology
3. Discussion and motions

10. Timeline
September 2009: Discussion paper on harmonization of water data exchange formats (1st version) ; IE1 announced
December 2009: Update on the harmonization report; Proposed WaterML 2.0 schema announced; IE1 officially launched, IE 2 announced
June 2010: WaterML 2.0 in Beta; IE2 launched; Harmonization report released
December 2010: IE1 final report, leading to a best practice paper based on the results; possibly IE3 launched (water quality? forecasting?)
March 2011: WaterML 2.0 released (after RFC package -> SWG -> public comments  voting); Ontology task force started (with GRDC, CSIRO, CUAHSI, others) ;
April 2011: a HDWG all-hands workshop (3-4 days)
June 2011: IE2 final report, and a paper
December 2011: WaterML best practices, service stacks and adoption
© 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

11. Interoperability Experiments
Groundwater
GSC\USGS
Dec 09 – Dec 10
Surface Water
CSIRO
Jun 10 – Jun 11
Forecasting
NWS\Deltares?
Dec 10 – Dec 11
Water Quality
Water Use

12. CUAHSI Water Data Services, April 2010
Map Integrating NWIS, STORET, & Climatic Sites
47 public services
13,200+ variables
1.8 million sites
22.9 million series
4.7 billion data values
(96% of them searchable)
The largest water data catalog in the world

13. Federal Agency Water Data Services at HISCentral (04/2010)
Network Name
Site Count
Value Count
Earliest Observation
Notes
NWISDV
32147
1/1/1900
WaterML-compliant GetValues service from NWIS, catalog ingested
EPA
362645
SOAP wrapper over WQX services, catalog harvested
NWISUV
11987
60 DAYS
WaterML-compliant GetValues Service, catalog ingested
NCDC ISH
11555 *
1/1/2005
WaterML-compliant GetValues service from NCDC, catalog harvested
NCDC ISD
24770
1/1/1892
NWISIID
369148
1/9/1867
SOAP wrapper over NWIS web site, catalog harvested
NWISGW
827200
RIVERGAGES
2206
1/1/2000
WaterML compliant REST services from Army Corps of Engineers

14. Hydrologic Ontology http://hiscentral.cuahsi.org/startree.aspx
4/17/2018
Hydrologic Ontology

15. For More Information: Project web site http://his.cuahsi.org
OGC/WMO Hydrology Domain Working Group:
Public mailing list
Twiki
The CUAHSI HIS project:
Project web site
Thank you ...

16. SDSC Spatial Information Systems Lab
Research and system development
Services-based spatial information integration infrastructure, CI projects
Mediation services for spatial data, query processing, map assembly services
Long-term spatial data preservation
Spatial data standards and technologies for online GIS (OGC standards, standards development)
Support of spatial data projects at SDSC and beyond
Geosciences CI (GEON, CUAHSI, CBEO, OOI…)
services
In Neurosciences (BIRN, CCDB, INCF)
In regional development (NIEHS SRP, CRN…)
Contact: