Water Quality Interoperability Experiment

Description & preparation

Reliable, comprehensive and up-to-date monitoring data on water quality is a prerequisite to provide decision makers with the information they need to ensure the availability and sustainable management of water resources for both human uses and maintenance of aquatic ecosystems.

This interoperability experiment will advance the development of the WaterML 2.0 suite of standards in the area of water quality data. The WQ_IE will test interoperability and interconnection of the existing Water Quality Data Systems and their use with various OGC service standards (e.g. SOS/ST API, WFS/OGC API - Features, WMS/OGC API - Maps and CSW/OGC API - Records etc). It will identify how to support WaterML 2.0 development in the domain of Water Quality: including API identification and usage, and enhancement of WQ taxonomies/ontologies with the ultimate goal of OGC/WMO endorsement of an international standard for Water Quality data exchange.

The IE was the core topic of the of a 3 days workshop in 2022 co-organized by WMO-UNEP-UNESCO-WHO-OGC : Opening Workshop on Water Quality Monitoring.

The workshop objectives were the following:

1. Identifying potential synergies and mutual contributions between WMO-UNEP-WHO-UNESCO on in-situ water quality data observations, management and sharing.

2. Defining a WMO-UNEP-WHO-UNESCO coordination mechanism on in-situ water quality data observations, management and sharing.

3. Identifying the steps for the development of a joint WMO-UNEP-WHO-UNESCO work plan for regulatory and guidance material related to in-situ monitoring systems, from data collection to data sharing and use.

4. Identifying the way of interconnecting WHOS with GEMStat and other existing in-situ water quality data platforms and systems and how to connect these to the World Water Quality Assessment under development.

5. Identifying how to support the WaterML development in the domain of Water Quality: updating OGC WaterML -WQ Best Practice document with regards to evolutions in OGC APIs, and taxonomies/ontologies since 2014 and endorse an international standard on Water Quality data exchange.

6. Defining the Roadmap for an international OGC Interoperability Experiment on Water Quality data with pilot use cases (e.g., Lake Victoria, Lake Chad).

Public GitHub repository

The repository is available here : https://github.com/opengeospatial/WaterQualityIE/

It's the reference point for everything going on under the IE

Timeline

The IE kicks-off on Tuesday Sep 13th 2022 9:00 AM EDT / 15:00 Paris Time Zone (https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=09&day=13&year=2022&hour=09&min=00&sec=0&p1=179&sort=0 ).

Contact: SylvainGrellet