WaterML is a

technical standard A technical standard is an established norm or requirement for a repeatable technical task which is applied to a common and repeated use of rules, conditions, guidelines or characteristics for products or related processes and production methods, ...

and

information model An information model in software engineering is a representation of concepts and the relationships, constraints, rules, and operations to specify data semantics for a chosen domain of discourse. Typically it specifies relations between kinds of t ...

used to represent

hydrological Hydrology () is the scientific study of the movement, distribution, and management of water on Earth and other planets, including the water cycle, water resources, and environmental watershed sustainability. A practitioner of hydrology is calle ...

time series In mathematics, a time series is a series of data points indexed (or listed or graphed) in time order. Most commonly, a time series is a sequence taken at successive equally spaced points in time. Thus it is a sequence of discrete-time data. Ex ...

structures. The current version is WaterML 2.0, released an open standard of the

Open Geospatial Consortium The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international voluntary consensus standards organization for geospatial content and location-based services, sensor web and Internet of Things, GIS data processing and data sharing. It originated in 199 ...

(OGC).

History

WaterML 1.0

Version 1.0 of WaterML was published in 2009 by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science. WaterML 1.0 (and 1.1) is an

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...

exchange format developed for use specifically in the United States.

WaterML 2.0

WaterML 2.0 is an open standard of the OGC. Version 2.0 marks a harmonisation with different formats from various organisations and countries, including the Australian Water Data Transfer Format, WaterML 1.0 from the United States,XHydro
from Germany, and with existing OGC formats. WaterML 2.0 was adopted as an official standard by the OGC in September 2012, endorsed by the US Federal Geographic Data Committee, and has been proposed for adoption by the

World Meteorological Organisation The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science, climatology, hydrology and geophysics. The WMO originated from the Internat ...

(WMO). Example uses include: exchange of data for operational hydrological monitoring programs; supporting operation of infrastructure (e.g. dams, supply systems); cross-border exchange of observational data; release of data for public dissemination; enhancing disaster management through data exchange; and exchange in support of national reporting. The standard was developed through a harmonisation process by members of the joint OGC-WMO Hydrology Domain Working Group.
WMO/OGC Hydrology Domain Working Group wiki page

Structure

WaterML 2.0 makes use of existing OGC standards, primarily

Observations and Measurements Observations and Measurements (O&M) is an international standard which defines a conceptual schema encoding for observations, and for features involved in sampling when making observations. While the O&M standard was developed in the context of geog ...

(O&M) and the

Geography Markup Language The Geography Markup Language (GML) is the XML grammar defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to express geographical features. GML serves as a modeling language for geographic systems as well as an open interchange format for geographi ...

(GML). This enhances consistency and interoperability with other standards and web services. Through use of the O&M standard, WaterML 2.0 defines types allowing for standard definition of the core properties relating to hydrological time series, including: * The observed phenomenon * Spatial context * Temporal bounds * Procedure used in generating the time series (e.g. raw data from a sensor) * Result-specific metadata, such as time series qualifiers, interpolation types, comments, quality codes etc. * Monitoring points * Collections of related objects * Vocabularies for domain-specific terms The core information model is defined using the

Unified Modelling Language The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose, developmental modeling language in the field of software engineering that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. The creation of UML was originally m ...

, allowing for flexibility in creating implementation-specific encodings. The standard defines a GML-conformant

encoding allowing for use with OGC Web Services.

References

HighBeam
{{Open Geospatial Consortium standards Markup languages Open Geospatial Consortium XML-based standards Environmental data Open standards

History

WaterML 1.0

WaterML 2.0

Structure

See also

References