Making the invisible visible : The impact of federating groundwater data in Victoria, Australia
- Authors: Dahlhaus, Peter , Murphy, Angela , MacLeod, Andrew , Thompson, Helen , McKenna, Kirsten , Ollerenshaw, Alison
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Hydroinformatics Vol. 18, no. 2 (2016), p. 238-255
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- Description: The Visualising Victoria's Groundwater (VVG) web portal federates groundwater data for the State of Victoria, Australia, thus making legacy data, government datasets, research data and community sourced data and observations visible to the public. The portal is innovative because it was developed outside of the government and offers real-time accessto remote authoritative databases by integrating the interoperable web services they each provide. It includes tools for data querying and 3D visualisations that were designed to meet end-user needs and educate the broader community about a normally invisible resource. The social impact of the web portal was measured using multidisciplinary research that employed survey instruments, expert reference groups, and internet analytics to explore the extent to which the web portal has supported decision making by governments, industry, researchers and the community. The research found that single access, multiple data set web portals enhance capacity by providing timely, informed and accurate responses to answer queries and increase productivity by saving time. The provision of multiple datasets from disparate sources within a single portal has changed practices in the Victorian groundwater industry. © 2016 The Authors.
Improving access to groundwater data using GroundWaterML2
- Authors: Simons, Bruce , Nation, Eloise , Dahlhaus, Peter
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Conference proceedings
- Relation: 36th Hydrology and Water Resources Symposium: The Art and Science of Water, HWRS 2015; Hobart, Tasmania; 7th-10th December 2015 p. 609-616
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- Description: This paper describes the preliminary development and use in the Australian context of a standard designed to exchange groundwater related data. The storage and management of groundwater data is distributed across many agencies and organisations, in disparate databases and formats. Discovering, accessing, interpreting, reformatting and using this data can present considerable challenges for the end-user. Groundwater data interoperability consideration of the use of communication protocols to achieve technical interoperability, the use of common data models to achieve syntactic interoperability and the use of controlled vocabularies to achieve semantic interoperability. GroundWaterML2 is a Geography Mark-up Language (GML) application developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Hydro Domain Working Group. It is intended as a standard for the transfer of groundwater feature data, including data about water wells, aquifers, and related entities. The OGC initiated an interoperability experiment to develop and test the model for commercial, technical, scientific, environmental and policy use cases. CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and Federation University Australia contributed to the design of GroundWaterML2, and established separate OGC web services delivering data out of the National Groundwater Information System (NGIS) and Federation University Australia databases. These services delivered borehole location and construction details, downhole geology, hydrogeologic unit information, groundwater discharge properties, and groundwater fluid property observations. Bringing these services to production would allow users and clients, such as the 'Visualising Victoria's Groundwater' and 'Australian Groundwater Explorer' portals, to access data from multiple providers in a standard format. © 2015, Engineers Australia. All rights reserved.
- Description: The Art and Science of Water - 36th Hydrology and Water Resources Symposium, HWRS 2015
The conceptual schema in geospatial data standard design with application to GroundWaterML2
- Authors: Brodaric, Boyan , Boisvert, Eric , Dahlhaus, Peter , Grellet, Sylvain , Kmoch, Alexander , Letourneau, Francois , Lucido, Jessica , Simons, Bruce , Wagner, Bernhard
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards Vol. 3, no. 1 (2018), p. 1-15
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- Description: The explosive growth of geospatial data has stimulated the development of many standards aimed at decreasing data heterogeneity and enhancing data use. Well-established design methods for geospatial data standards typically involve the creation of two schemas for data structure, designated here as logical and physical, but this can lead to conceptual inconsistencies and modelling inefficiencies. In this paper we describe a design method that overcomes these issues by incorporating an additional schema – the conceptual schema – and demonstrate its application to the design of GroundWaterML2 (GWML2), a new international standard for groundwater data. Results include not only a new data standard, robustly constructed and tested, but also an enhanced method for geospatial data standard design.
An assessment of the monitoring methods and data limitations for inflow and infiltration in sewer networks
- Authors: Jayasooriya, Mahinda , Dahlhaus, Peter , Barton, Andrew , Gell, Peter
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Conference proceedings
- Relation: 36th Hydrology and Water Resources Symposium: The Art and Science of Water, HWRS 2015; Hobart, Tasmania; 7th-10th December 2016. p. 436-442
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- Description: Inflow and infiltration into separate sewer systems is an ongoing challenge experienced by water utilities in managing sewer networks across the world. An accurate estimation of groundwater infiltration in terms of volume and flow rate is important for making decisions on sewer rehabilitation and for the effective operation of sewer networks. The fast response of surface inflow to sewers occurs during or immediately after a prolonged or intense precipitation event and can often be exacerbated by illegal stormwater connections into the sewer network. The slow response of inflow to sewers can be attributed to deep infiltration or the discharge of groundwater into the sewer network. A common practice for most Australian water utilities in combatting the problem of infiltration and inflow is to undertake short to medium term sewer network flow monitoring, while collecting contemporaneous rainfall data, to assess the various volumes and their origin in their sewer networks. This paper presents a review of the current data collection practices, using the City of Ballarat in south eastern Australia as a case study. Discussion is provided around gaps in data collection practices to properly understand the problem and recommendations are made on what additional monitoring works should be performed so that infiltration, in particular, can be assessed on a sound scientific basis. © 2015, Engineers Australia. All rights reserved.
- Description: The Art and Science of Water - 36th Hydrology and Water Resources Symposium, HWRS 2015