CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System Project has developed services-based infrastructure for publishing, cataloguing, discovering and accessing hydrologic observations from multiple distributed repositories. The backbone of the HIS service-oriented architecture design is a set of standard web service APIs that define interactions between hydrologic data publication platform (HydroServer), the data cataloguing and discovery system (HydroCatalog) and client applications, such as HydroDesktop. The key standards used in the current operational version of HIS are WaterML 1.x and WaterOneFlow services. These specifications have been designed to unify hydrologic data discovery and access heterogeneous sources of hydrologic observations: academic data sources that store data in CUAHSI Observations Data Model (ODM) and large federal and state water data repositories (e.g. maintained by USGS, EPA, NCDC) that follow their own storage, metadata and access conventions. To establish a higher level of compatibility between a wider group of water data sources, at the national and international scales, and to take advantage of multiple third-party software applications, the CUAHSI HIS Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is now evolving to ensure that the key interfaces are compatible with OGC standards. Another advantage of this transition is that Open Geospatial Consortium provides transparent and community-accepted procedures and protocols for governing standards development. In particular, OGC has assembled an international group of experts in standards for water data and related fields (as the OGC/WMO Hydrology Domain Working Group) with the mission to examine existing standards, develop standardization priorities, coordinate development of specifications, organize their testing in a series of interoperability experiments, and lead the standards to community adoption.

The first part of the document focuses on the main concepts and components of CUAHSI HIS as a service-compliant hydrologic information system, and the transition from the current system to the new OGC-compliant interfaces. Part II of the document describes the main workflows needed to keep the new system operational.

Documents:

• Part 1 Concepts and Components CuahsiImplementaton_17.docx
• Part 2 ODM and WaterML Mappings CUAHSIImplementation_WaterMLMapping_08.docx

-- DavidValentine - 09 Mar 2012