SELFIE

US Internet of Water Distributed Data and Observations

Use Case Description

The Internet of Water (IoW) is an initiative proposed by a multi-stakeholder workshop that has been supported by a foundation and has a non-profit organization by the same name working toward the initiative’s goals. The initiative proposes a federated system of data providers and consumers that are aggregated into domain-specific “hub” organizations and coordinated by a single “umbrella” organization. Data producers are to maintain ownership and control of their information and federation is intended to be cache-only in that information ownership should never be transferred if the data producer wants to maintain ownership.

This use case applies to all types of water data–hydrography, hydrometric observations, hydrologic model results, water quality, hydrodynamics, etc. Ultimately, the hub and umbrella model requires construction of a linked-data system that references common environmental features throughout. Data providers’ services should use consistent methods to reference those features to facilite automated discovery of newly available or changed data.

See this github repository for more.
See the demo resources here for initial SELFIE content in this use case. Use this JSON-LD demo page as an entry-point.

User Story

As a user of water data, I need to discover and access water information relevant to the environmental feature I care about from all the organizations that hold data about it, so I don’t have to have special knowledge to access some information and so I don’t miss some potentially relevant information.

Datasets and Sources

USGS Reference Hydrography
State and local data and observations
University consortia aggregated data services
Federal aggregated data and services

In the long run, this demonstration should have a very broad scope. Initially, it will focus on building a catalog of hydrographic and observed data associated with hydrologic units.

Demo Description and Links

For this demonstration, the primary entry point is a single hydrologic unit with three realizations: 1) a hydrographic network of flowlines, 2) a catchment divide containing a polygon representation, and 3) a hydrometric network index of monitoring data.

These three realizations can be seen in the example below:

{
 "@context": [
  "https://opengeospatial.github.io/ELFIE/contexts/elfie-2/elf-index.jsonld",
  "https://opengeospatial.github.io/ELFIE/contexts/elfie-2/hy_features.jsonld"
 ],
 "@id": "https://geoconnex.us/SELFIE/usgs/huc/huc12obs/070900020601",
 "@type": "https://www.opengis.net/def/appschema/hy_features/hyf/HY_Catchment",
 "name": "Waunakee Marsh-Sixmile Creek",
 "description": "USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset Twelve Digit Hydrologic Unit Code Watershed",
 "catchmentRealization": [
  {
   "@id": "https://geoconnex.us/SELFIE/usgs/nhdplusflowline/huc12obs/070900020601",
   "@type": "https://www.opengis.net/def/appschema/hy_features/hyf/HY_HydrographicNetwork"
  },
  {
   "@id": "https://geoconnex.us/SELFIE/usgs/hucboundary/huc12obs/070900020601",
   "@type": "https://www.opengis.net/def/appschema/hy_features/hyf/HY_CatchmentDivide"
  },
  {
   "@id": "https://geoconnex.us/SELFIE/usgs/hydrometricnetwork/huc12obs/070900020601",
   "@type": "https://www.opengis.net/def/appschema/hy_features/hyf/HY_HydrometricNetwork"
  }
 ]
}

alt text -- SELFIE Logo

Links to Demo Resources

The demo was created using the R code found here: https://github.com/opengeospatial/SELFIE/tree/master/tools/R

While it will expand into other systems, the following resources have been contributed directly to the SELFIE space.

The top level Hydrologic Unit “HY_Catchment”: https://geoconnex.us/SELFIE/usgs/huc/huc12obs/070900020601

The flowlines “HY_HydrographicNetwork”: https://geoconnex.us/SELFIE/usgs/nhdplusflowline/huc12obs/070900020601

The boundary “HY_CatchmentDivide”: https://geoconnex.us/SELFIE/usgs/hucboundary/huc12obs/070900020601

The monitoring sites “HY_HydrometricNetwork”: https://geoconnex.us/SELFIE/usgs/hydrometricnetwork/huc12obs/070900020601

flowlines and boundary are intended to provide a visual representation and could also be used for geoprocessing workflows. Monitoring sites are a potentially long list of well-documented monitoring for the hydrologic unit. The state of “well-documented” in this use case is be a work in progress.

Demo findings and potential next steps

This demo demonstrates that the core SELFIE technical solution rooted in URI-14 -> URL-14 redirection works well. Links to representations and associated features are operable but additional implementations will be needed to gain needed experience before any strong conclusions can be made. Availability of domain feature models (classes and associations) continues to be an issue the community needs to address before full-fledged implementation of domain-data-model linked data will be possible.