Date and time
Friday 13 November, 9:00 - 17:00.
Description
The management of water, and thus water-related information, is of critical interest to all. While there might be differences in focus reflecting differences in local environments, there are many areas of overlap. In particular the core use for this information relates to supporting healthy communities and economies. Several initiatives are currently engaged in the deployment of services requiring an information model for the management, transfer and reporting of data related to water resources. These include (but are not restricted to): WaterML 2.0 being developed by the OGC Hydrology Domain Working group; CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System; the Health-e-Waterways project with SEQ-Healthy Waterways Partnership; the Australian Water Resources Observation Network (WRON); the Bureau of Meteorology AWRIS project.
All of these projects are developing software services for capturing, managing, correlating and analysing water-related information and data. There is an opportunity for and interest in harmonization across these different initiatives, allowing a consolidation of effort and efficiencies in tool and application development. As such, the University of Queensland and CSIRO would like to convene a workshop on the development of a harmonized information model for water resources. The workshop will comprise invited presentations from key national and international players in water information management as well as accepted submissions from local participants. International invitees will include: Catharine van Ingen (Microsoft Research) and David Valentine (San Diego Supercomputer Centre).
The workshop will cover: an overview of existing water data standards, markup languages and ontologies for data integration and exchange; interfaces for querying and delivering water-related datasets to agencies and stakeholders; mechanisms for identifying gaps, inconsistencies and spatial coverage of water data; methodologies and technologies for information modelling and serialization; strategies for harmonization and integration of cross-disciplinary and cross-organizational data; data agreements, IP issues and security aspects.
Who should attend
Attendees will be researchers and software developers who are interested in managing, analyzing, querying, modeling and visualizing water-related data and information.
What to bring
Attendees should ideally be working on projects that involve managing and modeling information about water resources.
About the presenters
Catharine van Ingen is currently located at Microsoft Research San Francisco, where she is collaborating with computer scientists and hydrologists at the Berkeley Water Center (BWC) and San Diego SuperComputing Center – exploring innovative database technologies to support collaborative eResearch in environmental and hydrological sciences.
Jane Hunter. Jane leads the eResearch Group within the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. Her area of expertise is the application of semantic web technologies to the integration, organization and preservation of research data and collections. She is currently the CI on the Health-e-Waterways project, a collaboration between UQ, SEQ-Healthy Waterways Partnership and Microsoft Research that is developing a water information management framework for SE Qld.
Peter Taylor. Peter is based in the CSIRO ICT Centre in Hobart, Australia. He is working on a project that uses sensor web technologies to provide real time monitoring of a catchments with the aim of a better understanding the hydrological cycle. He is an active member of the Open Geospatial Consortium, with a direct focus on development of the Sensor Web and water information standards.
Laurent Lefort. Laurent is working on the Water Information Research and Development Alliance (WIRADA) - a research program jointly managed by the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO's Water for a Healthy Country flagship. His work focuses on the creation and harmonisation of water standards for observation and feature data and on the convergence of geospatial standards based on XML schemas and UML models (from ISO/TC 211 and OGC) with semantic web ontologies and vocabularies(OWL, SKOS).
James Hunt. James has been a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley since 1980. His teaching and research interests center on water resources management and quantifying the transport of contaminants in environmental systems. He has been a co-Director of the Berkeley Water Center for three years where broad science, engineering and institutional challenges in water resources are addressed through campus, national laboratory, and industrial collaborations.