Interoperable exchange of groundwater data with OGC GroundWaterML2

WaterML2 has become a well-known synonym for internationally standardised hydrological data exchange, in particular for government agencies and research institutes across North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Technically, WaterML2 is becoming a suite of standards actively promoted and endorsed by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), more details: http://www.whycos.org/wordpress/?page_id=929)

- WaterML 2.0: Part 1 - Time series of Observations

- WaterML 2.0: Part 2 - Ratings, Gaugings and Sections

- WaterML 2.0: Part 3 - Surface Hydrology Features (aka HY_Features)

- WaterML 2.0: Part 4 - aka GroundWaterML 2 (GWML2) Data Exchange for Groundwater Features (including wells, springs, borelogs and well constructions)

Now there is a scientific publication that explains the GWML2 standard, its development and application in hydrogeology in detail:

"GWML2 is an international standard for the online exchange of groundwater data that addresses the problem of data heterogeneity. This problem makes groundwater data hard to find and use because the data are diversely structured and fragmented into numerous data silos. Overcoming data heterogeneity requires a common data format; however, until the development of GWML2, an appropriate international standard has been lacking. GWML2 represents key hydrogeological entities such as aquifers and water wells, as well as related measurements and groundwater flows. It is developed and tested by an international consortium of groundwater data providers from North America, Europe, and Australasia, and facilitates many forms of data exchange, information representation, and the development of online web portals and tools."

Brodaric, B., Boisvert, E., Chery, L. et al. (2018) Enabling global exchange of groundwater data: GroundWaterML2 (GWML2). Hydrogeology Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10040-018-1747-9

Related links and information:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10040-018-1747-9

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323914313_Enabling_global_exchange_of_groundwater_data_GroundWaterML2_GWML2


WaterML2 Part 4: GroundWaterML2 (GWML2) http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/gwml2

Groundwater SWG http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/groundwaterswg

OGC GroundWaterML 2 – GW2IE FINAL REPORT https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=64688

Using Liquid Democracy for Water Resources Management: A Review

... and how to link governmental policy processes and geosciences via an interactive decision making platform for water resources co-management.

Initial Context - Case Study New Zealand

The responsibility of management of natural resources, in particular water, is typically delegated to the Regional Councils by the Resource Management Act. Decisions regarding water management are regulated through the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management. However, those decisions need to be backed by thorough science and in consultation with all stakeholders, be it Iwi, domestic, agricultural or industrial water users, or the general public in regards to recreational services that water resources provide.

Current policy and management decision processes follow a rigid procedure, 1) the science to understand the resources, 2) a consultation process (if at all) about the plan how to manage the resource and 3) the development of a long term strategy and policy decision.

The main concern that I’d like to address is the agility of that process. These steps follow the traditional waterfall project management model, which probably is due to the limitations of current tools. Scientific models that aim to characterise the availability and of natural resources and dynamics of environmental process are developed, possible impact assessed and then described in reports for further use. The data and assumptions utilised in the research process are limited snapshots in time, dependent on the quality of data collection and curation processes, and scope and depth vary with available budget. Based on the information from these reports resource managers discuss strategies how to manage the water resources in reconciliation with demands. The consultation with users is again a cost- intensive process, because it is time-consuming. Furthermore, assumptions e.g. limits or local/regional differences in water allocation for the modelling process cannot be changed flexibly.

The consultation process therefore seems limited to very few pre-decided scenarios, which might not have considered all important stakeholders (who are all important stakeholders anyway?). Thus, a final management and policy decision is often not satisfactory.

I would like to propose more research into an agile, aka “liquid resource management system”. Recent advances in computer and web technologies for example allow dynamic exposure of datasets and scientific software. So it might be time to link data with models and a “delegated voting” mechanism into an online resource management feedback system. Such an online platform would provide the capabilities to run different scenarios transparently within a democratic discussion forum. Through delegates stakeholders can have their interests represented in a co-management approach which allows a close link of the resource managers with the affected communities while having the current science at hand.

Background Liquid Democracy

Probably one of the first explicit thoughts on Liquid Democracy originate from Bryan Ford's draft named Delegative Democracy from 2002. Back then it was uncertain what scientific venue(s) it would be suitable for. Bryan unfortunately didn’t manage to get back to exploring and developing it in any rigorous scientific fashion.

• Delegative Democracy: http://www.brynosaurus.com/deleg/deleg.pdf

However, he published a well cited informal blog post revisiting the idea and pointing to some of the interesting developments since 2002:

• Delegative Democracy Revisited: http://bford.github.io/2014/11/16/deleg.html

The closest academic work Bryan referred to as a reasonably serious, rigorous exploration of the topic of any kind (and the only peer-reviewed and published work directly on the topic that by then was James Green-Armytage’s political-economic analysis:

• Direct Voting and Proxy Voting: http://jamesgreenarmytage.com/proxy.pdf

• Green-Armytage, J. (2015). Direct Voting and Proxy Voting. Constitutional Political Economy, 26(2), 190–220. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-014-9176-9

This paper took a first step at theoretically defining and analyzing the idea from a cost/benefit perspective, but it’s only a first step and leaves a lot of unanswered questions and issues, and of does not contributes to the empirical space.

Helene Landemore, a colleague of Bryan in political science at Yale, has been interested in this and related “collective intelligence/decision-making” topics for a while. She is working with Rob Reich and Lucy Bernholz at Stanford on some events in the near future exploring this and other related “digital democracy” topics. One might try reaching out to any or all of them as additional points of contacts with more experience in the political and social sciences space.

Further academic or applied works around Liquid Democracy can be found occasionally, for example:

• Blum, C. & Zuber, C.I., 2015. Liquid Democracy: Potentials, Problems, and Perspectives. The Journal of Political Philosophy, 24(August 2014), pp.6–9. Available at: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/jopp.12065

• Rodriguez, M. et al., 2007. Smartocracy: Social Networks for Collective Decision Making. In 2007 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS’07). IEEE, pp. 90–90. Available at: http://public.lanl.gov/jhw/Jen/Publications_files/Smarto-Share.pdf

• Paulin, A., 2014. Through Liquid Democracy to Sustainable Non-Bureaucratic Government. CeDEM, 6(2), pp.216–230. Available at: http://research.apaulin.com/research/2014/cedem14-ld-snbg

• Boldi, P. et al., 2011. Viscous democracy for social networks. Communications of the ACM, 54(6), p.129. Available at: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1953154

• Zwattendorfer, B., Hillebold, C. & Teufl, P., 2013. Secure and Privacy-Preserving Proxy Voting System. 2013 IEEE 10th International Conference on e-Business Engineering, 0, pp.472–477

• Link, J.Á.B., Tchorbadjiiski, A. & Wehrle, K., 2014. Opportunistic Vote Delegation for E-Voting Based on Liquid Democracy. In Proceedings of the 6th Extreme Conference on Communication. Galapagos Islands: ACM. Available at: https://www.comsys.rwth-aachen.de/fileadmin/papers/2014/2014-bitsch-extremecom-liquid-democracy.pdf

• Behrens, J. et al., 2014. The Liquid Democracy Journal - Issue 1, Berlin. Available at: http://www.liquid-democracy-journal.org/.

• Behrens, J. et al., 2014. The Principles of LiquidFeedback. Interaktive Demokratie e. V. Berlin. ISBN: 978–3–00–044795–2, p.240

Liquid Democracy as an Integrating Technology Platform

Possibly the most prominent of the application of Liquid Democracy is the German Pirate Party [1], for which the Software Liquid Feedback was developed [2]. A Medium article describes the distinctive features [3]:

Liquid Democracy is a new form for collective decision making that gives voters full decisional control. Voters can either vote directly on issues, or they can delegate their voting power to delegates (i.e. representatives) who vote on their behalf. Delegation can be domain specific, which means that voters can delegate their voting power to different experts in different domains. This is in contrast with direct democracy, where participants are required to personally vote on all issues; and in contrast with representative democracy, where participants vote for representatives once in a certain election cycle and then never worry about voting anymore.

Coming back to the water sciences and data issues around the water resources management process. In the last decade so called geoportals evolved to integrated systems of systems, not only providing data, but also processing routines and visualisations of the processed geospatial data to support science and education as well as policy and decision making for particular environmental domains. From a scientific and data-centric point of view, it becomes an obvious choice to link the democratic processes with the data in an online platform, e.g. as suggested by Craglia & Shanley (2015), or in an elaborate study "When Water Becomes the New Oil" (Kwiatkowski & Höchli, 2016) from the Swiss Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute (GDI), an independent think tank based in Rüschlikon near Zurich, which frames this as a participatory process.

• Craglia, M. & Shanley, L., 2015. Data democracy - increased supply of geospatial information and expanded participatory processes in the production of data. International Journal of Digital Earth, 8(9), pp.679–693. Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17538947.2015.1008214

• Kwiatkowski, M. & Höchli, B., 2016. Wenn Wasser zum neuen Öl Wird Wie die Schweiz die Konflikte der Zukunft meistert, Zurich. Available at: http://www.gdi.ch/de/Think-Tank/Studien/Wenn-Wasser-zum-neuen-Oel-wird/727

Links

1. http://liquidfeedback.org/
2. http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/22154/how-german-pirate-partys-liquid-democracy-works
3. https://medium.com/organizer-sandbox/liquid-democracy-true-democracy-for-the-21st-century-7c66f5e53b6f
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiquidFeedback

Starting to play with spatial-temporal data

Thinking  the big picture is a different thing to actually implement it :-) Well, who doesn't know that. Having some hydrological time-series (groundwater levels) in place in a sensor observation service (SOS), the hydrogeological all-in-one-wonder-portal is going to get a glance of the next level :-p
The last weeks I started to play around with the R environment for statistical computing and visualization (The R Project). 52°North developed a neat R toolkit to access and digest SOS time-series - sos4R.

It is well documented and pretty easy to connect to a SOS server, and query observations. So for the fun of it and to demonstrate the general feasibilty, I quickly queried the groundwater levels of the Horowhenua area in New Zealand, where I got some sample data (courtesy by the regional council).

With the R sos4R, fields and akima packages from the CRAN R packages archive I (quite coarsely) interpolated the groundwater surfaces for the years 1991-2009 and put the images together as an animated gif (meters above mean sea level over time).

Discussion

I am aware of the total uselessness of this particualr way presenting :-) No years, the scale changes slightly, and the exact spatial extent and north orientiation are not reliable :-p

Nevertheless, for just playing around, this was a motivating simple first shot to easily visualise changes over time.

I would like to play around with the gstat and spacetime R package, integrate a more sophisticated script as a 52°North WPS process and have those things happening automagically in the interwebz.

Groundwater Resources in New Zealand

Data Synthesis and visualisation for groundwater resources in New Zealand

“As a conservative estimate, better understanding of groundwater resources could lead to improvements in water management with potential to prevent social, cultural, environmental and economic losses of $1 billion or more, about 1% of New Zealand’s GDP. Understandably, central and regional government has identified improved characterisation of groundwater resources as a top research priority.”

The SMART project is about characterisation of New Zealand’s aquifers, to improve ground- and freshwater management (www.smart-project.info).

The main research aims of the SMART project

• focus on novel, passive suite of methods to measure groundwater volume and changes in it over time
• aquifer hydraulic properties
• fluxes of groundwater interchange with surface waters
• water age
• with methods like ...
• ambient noise seismic tomography
• airborne geophysical surveying
• satellite remote sensing
• fibre optic temperature sensing
• novel age tracers

Outcomes shall made available via a web portal and harmonised 3D groundwater database that will meet stakeholder needs for open access, ease of use, and interoperability with existing systems. Furthermore the integration of existing data is crucial.

My Thesis Topics

I contribute in the field of “data synthesis and visualisation” in the form of a prototype 3D/4D WebGIS, data processing and web services to provide harmonised hydro(geo)logical data from multiple sources. Within the works for my Master Thesis until June 2012, I identified following milestones:

• stakeholder consultation - groundwater workshop, visited HBRC and EW
• gather and analyse (sample) hydro(geo)logical datasets from wells, boreholes or pump tests, managed in systems/databases like GGW/NGMP (GNS), Hilltop and Wiski (very popular among regional councils) – Feb 2012
• find a common data scheme/data model, migrate and/or transform data online and provide via web services to connect to a (NZ) SDI or integrate/link in web portal for easy access – April 2012
• identify appropriate technology and standards (ISO, OGC, OASIS … ) 3D/4D visualisation in the web, as aquifers are inherently 3D structures plus time (water time series data -> 4D) – June 2012

The prototype implementations of this thesis will be in test mode, accessible by designated staff and stakeholders. The research about “data synthesis and visualisation” including the topics of this Master Thesis will be continued in more detail by a PhD student from July 2012.

We focus on hydro(geo)logical data. The first steps are about accessing multiple existing sources of data and find a way to publish them via web services (most likely OGC).

Major Challenges include

• complexity of water-related data – many parameters and measurement properties, parameter naming, units etc.
• data policy issues (ownership, restricted access ...)
• data quality and quality and assurance issues – uncertainty, hint/description in metadata
• as existing data often is not accessible outside their environments (GNS network, regional councils’ local data storage), or mostly via manual file-based email/ftp interchange or as “pdf”-reports, the publishing of existing data from multiple sources is anticipated via the web e.g. via WMS, WFS, WCS, WaterML2.0?, SOS, download (shapefile, raster coverage) to allow easy recombination, correlation and analysis at national scale (surpassing regional boundaries)
• find a common data scheme, probably “just” implement a software to access databases and deliver WaterML2.0?! Good idea might be to transform online (e.g. XSLT/WPS web service)
• provide infrastructure, for storage, access, delivery and manipulation of different geodata (vector, raster, time series …)
• Prepare catalogue and provide metadata in standard encodings (XML, OGC web services, ISO 19115/19139 metadata, CSW, CS-W ebRIM/ISO)
• Regarding exisiting methods and infrstructures, like Auscope / SISS (AU), GeoNet (NZ), GENESIS FP7 (EU), CUAHSI (North America)
• Think about GeoSciML for description of geology and geometry, as WaterML is more about time series and measurement data prototypical web 3D/4D map/aquifer visualisation (X3D earth ...)