Hydroinformatics

UNESCO-IHE and the Envirogrids project ran a symposium and workshops last week (18-19 April 2011) about interoperability of environmental information and modelling systems. Andreja Jonoski writes:

The OpenWater Symposium and Workshops were organised at UNESCO-IHE in collaboration with the large EU FP7 research project Envirogrids, which has the goal to develop a grid-based infrastructure for spatially distributed environmental data from the region of the Black Sea catchment.

The symposium and the workshops were focused on sharing of experiences to support increasing interoperability of new ICT based systems, systems of systems and standards in the water domain. Several initiatives are currently being undertaken to develop open standards and interfaces under GEO, OGC, OpenMI Association and many research projects around the world. OpenWater was organised as a series of invited presentations, dedicated workshops, and oral/poster presentations.

Workshops were organised on the following topics:

• Bringing GEOSS and INSPIRE services into practice: Publish and share data and metadata using OGC services and ISO standards
• SWAT-CUP: Automatic calibration procedures for SWAT modellers
• MapWindow: Open GIS software and Environmental Modelling
• EnviroGRIDS portal: Tools for modelling and data processing in the Black Sea Basin

The OpenWater symposium addressed one key aspect that needs to be tackled with open standards and approaches, namely software interoperability  (in this case interoperability of models and data) Software developed by different persons and organisations, data in different formats, different protocols for sharing these data, etc…, these are all obstacles for achieving desired interoperability. Various initiatives are currently dealing with these problems when it comes to the water domain, all aiming to achieve some sort of standardisation:

• Dynamic integration of different models using Open Modelling Interface (OpenMI) – a European initiative led primarily by partners such as Deltares, DHI, and HR Wallingford
• The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) already developed standards for sharing geospatial information, and its Hydrology Working Group is looking for ways how standards related to hydrological information can become part of OGC (it seems that the Water Markup Language – or WaterML is on its way to become one such standard for sharing time series of water observations)
• As the Internet becomes the medium for sharing such information, particularly using web services, various organisations are picking up these standards and  developing such services that provide useful water-related information

It is very valuable that both open source and free software providers , together with commercial software providers are jointly participating in these initiatives, many of which were presenting their work during OpenWater.