Reference Architecture

The purpose of this document is to describe the data integration architecture for the New Mexico Water Data Initiative. It will:

1. Outline the overall multi-agency architecture

2. Provide template procedures for how agencies can integrate their data

3. Provide common vocabulary for the initiative

The New Mexico Water Data Initiative Architecture

The goal of the New Mexico Water Data Initiative is to make available to the public data collected by multiple agencies about water resources in New Mexico in a common format. Many (but not all) agency data are already published online through services such as ESRI web maps, excel files, or in some cases public APIs. However, important aspects for a given data type (such as water table level measurements from wells) such as data/time formats, geospatial projections, column names, and units vary from agency to agency and even from dataset to dataset within agencies. In order to allow users to access data from multiuple agencies in one format, the NMWDI architecture will route all agency data through one Web API standard with one corresponding underlying data model that references one common statewide water data controlled vocabulary. This will require, one way or another, for all contributing agency data to be mapped to the common data model and transformed into the common format before being delivered to users (Figure 1).