GROUNDWATER Standards Working Group (GW SWG)

Introduction

A significant portion of the global water supply can be attributed to groundwater resources. Effective management of such resources requires the collection, management and delivery of related data, but these are impeded by issues related to data availability, distribution, fragmentation, and heterogeneity: collected data are not all readily available and accessible, available data is distributed across many agencies in different sectors, often thematically fragmented, and similar types of data are diversely structured by the various data providers. This situation holds both within and between political entities, such as countries or states, thereby impairing groundwater management across all jurisdictions. Groundwater data networks are an emerging solution to this problem as they couple data providers through a unified data delivery vehicle, thus reducing or eliminating distribution, fragmentation, and heterogeneity through the incorporation of standards for data access and data content. The relative maturity of OGC data access standards, such as the Web Feature Service (WFS) and Sensor Observation Service (SOS), combined with the rise of water data networks, have created a need for GroundWaterML2 (GWML2), a common groundwater data specification.

Purpose

The Groundwater (GW) SWG aims to:

• Develop a data exchange standard for the groundwater domain. The standard is to be known as GroundWater Markup Language 2 (GWML2) and will consist of conceptual and logical information models, as well as language specific implementations that initially minimally include a GML-XML encoding specification.
• Maintain and update the standard once established.

Documents

• Charter: the GW SWG charter can be found... here
• Specification: the GWML2 standard specification can be found... here
• Online documentation: the GWML2 online documentation (Logical Model) can be found... here

Meetings

Initial meetings of the GW SWG overlap with the final meetings of the Groundwater 2 IE:

• 02Mar2016 (Wed) GW2IE Meeting 50 / GW SWG Meeting 1
• 30Mar2016 (Wed) GW2IE Meeting 51 / GW SWG Meeting 2
• 13April2016 (Wed) GW2IE Meeting 52 / GW SWG Meeting 3 -- CANCELLED
• 26April2016 (Tues) GW2IE Meeting 52 / GW SWG Meeting 3
• 11May2016 (Wed) GW2IE Meeting 53 / GW SWG Meeting 4
• 08June2016 (Wed) GW2IE Meeting 54 / GW SWG Meeting 5 -- CANCELLED
• 15June2016 (Wed) GW2IE Meeting 54 / GW SWG Meeting 5
• 19March2018 (Mon) GW SWG Meeting 6
• 25June2019 (Tues) GW SWG Meeting 7

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• 04May2021 (Tues) GW SWG Meeting 8