Linked Data/ Internet of Water Connection
- Kyle Onda (Unlicensed)
The Internet of Water (IoW) is an initiative proposed by a multi-stakeholder workshop that has been supported by a foundation and has a non-profit organization by the same name working toward the initiative's goals. The initiative proposes a federated system of data providers and consumers that are aggregated into domain-specific "hub" organizations and coordinated by a single "umbrella" organization. Data producers are to maintain ownership and control of their information and federation is intended to be cache-only in that information ownership should never be transferred if the data producer wants to maintain ownership.
This use case applies to all types of water data--hydrography, hydrometric observations, hydrologic model results, water quality, hydrodynamics, etc. Ultimately, the hub and umbrella model requires construction of a linked-data system that references common environmental features throughout. Data providers' services should use consistent methods to reference those features to facilite automated discovery of newly available or changed data. These consistent methods are being developed by the international Second Environmental Linked Features Interoperability Experiment.
See this github repository for more.
See the demo resources here for initial SELFIE content in this use case.
Use this JSON-LD demo page as an entry-point.
User Story
As a user of water data, I need to discover and access water information relevant to the environmental feature I care about from all the organizations that hold data about it, so I don't have to have special knowledge to access some information and so I don't miss some potentially relevant information. Examples of sources of relevant information include:
USGS Reference Hydrography
State and local data and observations
University consortia aggregated data services
Federal aggregated data and services
NGO data and services
To enable this user story, what is required is for all environmental features, and their monitoring stations, to have individual web “MetaResources” that link to each other and their data content when relevent. This way, both dedicated web crawlers and commercial search engines can build search indexes and metadata catalogs the same way they do for every other resource on the internet.
Two things that WDI can do to be plugged into such a system are:
Create and/or document structured meta-resources for items such as wells, stations, gauges, transects (anythign that data is generated about). These pages can be built by:
inserting structured JSON-LD content into the headers of existing content such as https://maps.nmt.edu/maps/data/hydrograph/TO-0186
creating such pages from scratch using tools such as PyGeoAPI, perhaps automating based off of calls to sensorthings/api/v1.0/Locations
submitting geoJSON catalogs of locations to the geoconnex.us project implementation at info.geoconnex.us
Mint PIDs for them using the geoconnex.us framework, perhaps reserving the namespace https://geoconnex.us/nmwdi/.
Conceptual Demonstration from Visualizing Victoria’s Groundwater
The VVG web portal has been a point of reference for NM WDI. Below is a description of both its strengths and how it’s use case could be strengthened by linked data. The same applies to NM WDI.
Use Case Description
To provide a means whereby all the relevant information (resources) about a real world feature (in this case a borehole or well) can be brought together via a machine readable (and indexable) 'page/not a page'
User Story
Groundwater bore data management in Victoria is split across a number of Government departments, research agencies and community groups. Information about the same real-world entity borehole may exist in multiple databases. The VVG web portal partly addressed this problem by federating these disparate data services into a spatial web portal that allows the user to access ALL the information regardless of the source or duplication. History of Bore data in Victoria
Information about a borehole exists at one or more of:
Geological Survey of Victoria (GSV)
Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP)
State Library of Victoria (SLV)
Federation Univesity Australia (FedUni)
These are services deliver one or more of:
HTML
GML
JSON
Documents / multimedia
The data from these services may be about:
Geology / Aquifers
Groundwater (water quality, levels)
Borehole construction
Reports
Observations made on things intersected in the bore
However, this is still not ideal. Currently the user must individually discover and access these different data services and compile the relevant information about a Borehole manually. Where the same borehole
exists aross multiple data sources it is not readily apparent that they are the same real world feature (there is no common identifier across these services). Additionally there is no mechanism to identify the different types of information available.
Through this demonstration a user should be able to use a standard search engine to discover the availability of these various sources, formats and contents via a MetaResource (MR). The user (including machines) can navigate via the links in the MR to request data from the various providers in one of the available formats.