About CUAHSI The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) is an organization representing 120+ universities in the US and 11 international affiliates. As part of its mission, CUAHSI supports the development of cyberinfrastructure for the hydrologic sciences. The CUAHSI HIS (Hydrologic Information System) project is a multi-year multi- institution effort focused on consistent management and integration of observational data available from several federal agencies (USGS, EPA, USDA, NOAA, etc.) as well as published by academic investigators. Databases Analysis Models Rainfall & Snow Water quantity and quality Remote sensing Meteorology Soil water The project’s focus is enhancement of hydrologic science by facilitating user access to more and better data for testing hypotheses and analyzing hydrologic processes This involves: assembling and querying integrated nations’s repository of water data linking small integrated research sites with global climate models integrating data from multiple disciplines to understands controls on hydrologic cycle developing mechanisms for publishing heterogeneous government and academic data Publishing hydrologic observations Service-oriented architecture for hydrologic data CUAHSI HIS develops service-oriented architecture for hydrologic research and education, to enable publication, discovery, retrieval, analysis and integration of hydrologic data. The project team has defined a common information model for organizing hydrologic observation data, designed a common exchange protocol (Water Markup Language), created a collection of SOAP web services (WaterOneFlow services) that provide uniform access to different federal, state and local hydrologic data repositories, and developed mechanisms for ontology- based data registration and discovery. CUAHSI member universities in the US HIS Central Register Service Upload Icons, Test Service Service is Harvested Tag Variables with ontology concepts Data is available in Hydroseek Observations Data Model WaterML WaterML WaterOneFlow Web Services Semantic Mediation Test bed HIS Servers Central HIS servers ArcGIS Matlab IDL, R MapWindow Excel Programming (Fortran, C, VB) Desktop clients Customizable web interface (DASH) HTML - XML WSDL - SOAP Modeling (OpenMI) Global search (Hydroseek) WaterOneFlow Web Services, WaterML Controlled vocabularies Metadata catalogs Ontology ETL services HIS Lite Servers External data providers Other popular online clients ODM DataLoader Streaming Data Loading Ontology tagging (Hydrotagger) WSDL and ODM registration Data publishing ODMTools Server config tools HIS Central Registry & Harvester This system is implemented as a collection of HIS Servers deployed at NSF-supported Hydrologic Observatory test beds across the nation. Several HIS Server are deployed at other partner universities and agencies, and internationally. Deployment Science goals End-to-end three-tier solution: from publication and registration to discovery and analysis of hydrologic observation data Vocabularies used by each data source, are matched up with a common controlled vocabulary. In the process of water data service registration, variable names in each source are associated with concepts in a CUAHSI HIS ontology. This provides for semantics-aware data discovery and integration regardless of naming conventions or synonyms used by individual sources. Observations Data Model (ODM) is a standardized and community- tested relational schema for storing hydrologic observation data and a sufficient amount of metadata, in a form that aids in effective sharing and analysis of information from disparate sources. ODM Data Loaders support efficient ingestion of data and metadata from files or data streams. ODMTools software is designed to manage and quality Water Markup Language (WaterML) is a standard XML schema for hydrologic time series, designed to support exchange of hydrologic information between servers and clients within HIS. It contains general constructs describing sites, variables, time series, and data values. Designed to be the least barrier for adoption by hydrologists, WaterML control of information in ODM. Loading investigator data into ODM, and providing access to the data via generic ODM web services, are the first steps towards sharing and integrating hydrologic observations within the Hydrologic Information System. relies on both the ODM relational schema adopted for managing data from academic projects, and the data and metadata available from government hydrologic repositories at the national and state levels. WaterML 1.0 specification is available as an OGC Discussion Paper at standards/dp. WaterOneFlow Web Services provide a uniform way to query and access observations data and metadata within HIS, regardless of intricacies of individual data sources. The following core methods are supported: GetSites GetSiteInfo GetVariableInfo GetValues WaterOneFlow method calls return WaterML- compliant documents to HIS clients. The list of data sources that are accessed via WaterOneFlow services include: USGS National Water Information system (Daily Values, Ground Water, Instantaneous Irregular Data, Unit Values), EPA STORET, USDA Snowpack Telemetry (SNOTEL), NCDC ASOS, MODIS, DAYMET, NAM12K, as well as over 40 observation networks contributed by academic research projects and made accessible via ODM Generic Web Services. The WaterOneFlow services and WaterML are being adopted by HIS partners, including government agencies. While syntactic heterogeneity is managed by water data being described using ODM and WaterML, and accessed via uniform Web services, semantic differences across observation networks require a different approach. CUAHSI HIS supports data publication workflow for hydrologic observations. The steps include: Loading data into ODM instance and configuring a Generic ODM web service providing access to the data (typical for relatively small academic projects) OR Configuring a custom WaterML- compliant web service and assembling a source metadata catalog (typical for large remote repositories) Registering the new water data service at a local HIS Server (to be accessible via DASH, Data Access System for Hydrology), AND/OR Registering the service at the HIS Central, a web application for managing and exploring WaterML- compliant services. By indexing both government and academic water data services, HISCentral provides a gateway to the largest collection of water observations in the nation. Once a new water data service is registered, tested and described at HISCentral, an HISCentral’s harvester retrieves site and variable metadata, and the data series information. Adding a water data service to the integrated metadata catalog The next step is tagging the harvested variables using CUAHSI ontology concepts, and making the new water data service appear in Hydroseek, a web application for ontology-based and map- based search and retrieval of hydrologic data from multiple networks. Links HIS Central: CUAHSI HIS: Hydroseek: HIS SDSC : Mailing list: subscribe at Hydrologic Information System for the Nation