OGC Water Quality Interoperability Experiment: Call for Participation (CFP)

This initiative is being conducted under the OGC Innovation Program. This program provides a collaborative agile process for solving geospatial challenges. Organizations (sponsors and technology implementers) come together to solve problems, produce prototypes, develop demonstrations, provide best practices, and advance the future of standards. Since 1999 more than 100 initiatives have taken place.

IEs are generally structured to support or extend the standardization work in the OGC and thus the IE participants will coordinate closely with the appropriate OGC Technical Committee Working Groups, such as the Geoscience DWG mentioned above.

Answers to this Call are collected with the OGC Innovation Program contact form. Alternatively they can be sent to innovation@ogc.org.

Official IE Observers will be granted access to the IE project on the OGC Portal. Observer status allows the member or non-member to monitor progress of the given IE, have access to the IE e-mail reflector, access documents as they are posted to the IE folder on the portal, contribute software and/or data to the effort, and so forth. Observer status does not allow the Member or non-member to attend the IE Kickoff meeting, formally comment on documents, or otherwise disrupt the execution of the IE. Interoperability Engineering Reports from the IE will be made available to all OGC members at the end of the IE for review and comment.

Since 2008, Members of the OGC/WMO Hydrology Domain Working Group have been developing the WaterML 2.0 standards for the transmission of a broad suite of water information. Interoperability of water quality data is critical to improved management of water resources and depends on the use of common semantics (vocabularies/taxonomies) and technical scenarios.

Furthermore, sharing of water quality data globally and nationally is currently limited. This is likely due to a lack of shared international standards and practices in this area and to the variety and distribution of responsibilities across agencies at national scale in the field of water quality. Some practices do already exist, most commonly on a per country basis (e.g., US WQX, French Sandre, etc.) with the exception of the EU environmental reporting in the field of water (EU WFD/WISE and EIONET-related reporting). However, in most cases those practices are not based on current internationally-agreed semantic and technical interoperability practices (OGC, W3C, RDA).

Establishment of international standards for water quality data is a key activity towards enhancing the availability of water quality information at the global level and increasing the effectiveness of development activities.

The IE will build on:

The participants propose to vet the existing OGC Standards Baseline for common Water Quality data exchange use cases and build consensus with a broad community (WMO, RDA, others) for how to express water quality observation and sampling information.

The interoperability experiment will deliver an Engineering Report (ER) outlining opportunities to use existing technology, update the WaterML2 Best Practice for water quality, and set the stage for a WMO endorsed data exchange standard for water quality (including shared variables).

The objectives of this IE include the following.

The following initiatives for the basis for the Organizational use cases to be considered in the IE.

The above high-level Organizational use cases will provide overall framing for the IE, but ultimately, the experiment will address specific water quality domain use cases. The specific definition of these domain use cases will be determined as an initial component of the experiment. Potential Water Quality Domain Use Cases include:

The IE participants will attempt to address the following experiments, which are centered on each of the aforementioned use cases.

Participants in this IE will enlist technology and domain experts from this team as required. Attention will be paid towards encoding and delivery of water quality data and metadata and integration with common WQ taxonomies/ontologies.

Participants will meet at scheduled OGC meetings or other venues, once or twice a year as required, and will otherwise carry out business electronically via email, teleconferencing, and web conferencing.

The IE will kick off with an in-depth analysis of existing use cases and the data exchange arrangements that are currently in use. This harmonization and exploration phase will inform a shared vision of the problem space and what potential solutions may be worth pursuing. Technical experiments will be designed based on the outcomes of this first phase.

Technical experiments will take the form of thought experiments, design workshops, and exploratory model/software development for the sake of evaluation. They will aim to check assumptions and vet approaches such that, at the end of the IE, the activities demonstrate the utility or failings of investigated approaches.

Demonstrations are planned during OGC Hydro Domain Working Group (DWG) meetings to demonstrate progress. Each demonstration will illustrate more functionality, with the final demonstration showing complete functionality necessary to support the use cases of the IE.

The primary focus of this IE will be on reusing as much as possible the OGC Standards Baseline. However, if the need arises, the IE will consider the development and testing of evolutions of the Standards (semantics and technical). Such activity will be duly documented in the Engineering Report and reported back to the relevant OGC Standards Working Groups (SWGs) via the appropriate Change Request.

Depending on the result of the experimentation, the IE may also lead to an OGC Best Practice (the form of which is yet to be determined as the pre-existing WaterML-WQ BestPractice will be considered in the IE).

The following components will be developed concurrently by the responsible organization(s), to be completed by the execution end date:

Other related services/clients that will be possibly covered during the IE:

Testing and integration will largely involve implementation of the use case(s). At least two testing and integration sessions will be proposed, once at the beginning of the testing and integration period and once directly prior to the demonstration. Others may occur as required. Hydro DWG members will do their best to engage the research community via the RDA Global Water Information Interest Group (GWIIG).

The following documentation will comprise the deliverables for the project:

A live virtual demonstration of all functioning components will be made towards the end of the IE.

In order to become a participant in this IE, an organization must be willing make a resource commitment and a substantial contribution in one or more of the following areas:

Intellectual property (IP) brought to the IE will remain with the participants. IP related to advancement of specific agency information systems will also remain with the participants. IP related to the development or advancement of OGC standards (e.g., WaterML 2.0) will rest with the Hydrology DWG and its joint authorities: the OGC and WMO. Any remaining IP that results from the IE will be jointly owned by all participants. The participants agree to respect the collaborative nature of the experiment with due acknowledgement of the participants and, if appropriate, undertake co-authorship in any ensuing materials.